Stereo Component for Digital Audio

An anonymous reader writes "The techs over at Tech Radio interviewed Lydstrom, Inc. about their recently announced Songbank MZ3-5000, a digital audio player meant for the home that uses compression technology from Lucent to store up to 5000 songs on one player. Apparently the quality of the output is better than MP3, but the device is also MP3 compatible. They posted the interview on their Archives page. " My guess is that a huge number of us have hacked together stereo components to do this already (I use xmms & the IRMan plugin for mine- although I wish it had better handling of large numbers of playlists). Interesting tho.

Comments

Details from the site

[Squiggle]

All I can say is this thing is sweet! Here are the details from the site, for those too lazy:

o approx 250 hours of songs
o IEEE-1394 connector for extra storage units
o auto detect song title, artist, etc (if stored on CD)
o smooth fade between songs and beat matching for DJ-like transitions between songs
o "CustomDJ": "...an intelligent agent that watches how you listen to music. As it learns about your listening habits, it will automatically play the songs you like at the right time and day of the week."
o touchscreen remote
o 3 stereo (analog) outs - play different selections in different rooms at the same time!

Plus its good looking. Costs $699 - $999 depending on when you want this thing and which promotional offer you take.

Are there any software mp3 players that have the beat matching and DJ abilities this has? Those are the kind of features I would put in a design of my own - can't do that on a CD player (without having your own personal DJ :)