Ashley of techdigest.tv brought this nifty gadget to my attention. The Hard-Fi is a set-top box that makes it a one-touch operation to rip a CD to MP3, tag all the tracks (with a built-in CDDB database), and load it on an MP3 player via USB. I doubt any of you guys need such a thing but I imagine it would pretty useful for people who struggle with technology. Like my mom, who can't even figure out the iPod I got her for Christmas. Ugh. So there's bound be at least 5.9 billion humans who could use a thing like this. The only problem I forsee is that these kind of devices are usually priced beyond what thier functionality would suggest and beyond what most of us would pay. It's probably just a bare-bones linux system in there with some kind of script for ripping, tagging, and transferring.

As for when or where you could get one, it's not exactley clear. One page mentions that the first product with the system is already available (see pic) but it fails to give you any of the particulars. Ah well. We'll keep an eye out.

HardFi.org via techdigest.tv

UPDATE: ok, so they had the file name of that picture labled sp150.jpg and a bit of google'n turns up the Acoustic Solutions SP150. A review at digitalhomemag.com details its ripping ability (to an internal hard drive) but doesn't mention the ability to download directly to an MP3 player, so I'm guessing that feature probably hasn't been implemented in any production model yet. Somebody, get to it.