My very non-technically oriented brother has expressed interest in MP3s recently. He has more CDs than he can put in the Sony 100 CD jukebox that he has set up with his home stereo system. A while back I mentioned that I thought there must be a CD player out there somewhere that would rip your CDs to MP3s during playback, and then store them on an internal hard drive for later playback without the CD.

Doing a Google search, I came up with a couple:

DJ Digital Audio Jukebox

Sima Imix im-120 Digital Audio Recorder

I don't see any info there on what encoder is used, or how much control these is over MP3 encoding parameters.

Has anyone had any experience working with these or any other such devices that they might be able to offer some feedback on?

Thanx,

Shel

There is Terratecs CAR4000 with 40 GB HDD. It uses an FhG-Fastenc encoder up to 192 kbps (or WAV) and rips only in realtime.

On the one hand, it is an excellent HiFi device with great sounding components (it's Terratec). On the other hand, there is no LAN/Firewire connection (just USB) and there might be problems with copy protected CD's (i don't buy them).
It is also a line-in recorder with good timer-functions.

Unfortunally, the Gracenote-CDDB updates don't come regularly.

http://productsen.terratec.net/modules.php...article&sid=132

HP has (had) one two.

Take a look at Gateway. They have a network device that i think would fit the bill.

http://accessories.gateway.com/AccessorySt...1303_ProdDetail

http://accessories.gateway.com/AccessorySt...9332_ProdDetail

(okay, so it's actually turtle beach...)

Had to search Google for 'Fraunhofer' and 'C.A.R. 4000' to find a little more about this device. It does a lot, but at this point in time, I'm getting the feeling that home stereo components that play and rip CDs to MP3s are at the stage of development that portable MP3 players where a few years back. It may be best for my brother to wait a while before deciding to buy one of these animals.

My brother probably doesn't care at this point about things I'd have to have like gapless and MP3 playback with normalized volume, two features I don't see any mention about for the 'C.A.R. 4000'. But waiting for Gracenote to update their CDDB may be an issue.

Can't find a price or seller in the USA, but from the £599.99 price in the UK and your comment about Terratec, I take it this is a pretty high end stereo component.

Shel

These only play MP3s. There's no music CD player. Good looking devices from Turtle Beach though.

Shel