Featuring an iPod dock, as you’d expect, the Ceol will also stream your tunes wirelessly from your PC or laptop, hook up to your Network Attached Storage device and play tunes from that, and even play tunes from an ordinary MP3 player via USB.

If that’s still not enough, you can listen to Napster and Last.FM, Internet Radio, classic radio (i.e. FM/AM), and even CD, as it has its own built-in CD player.

Add to this huge list the ability to control your tunes via an iPhone or iPod app, a mighty 65W per channel of power, and Denon’s legendary sound quality, and you might just have the best network music player on the market.

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Let’s take a more detailed look…

Google Music Locker

Yes this is your music in the cloud, and here you can put the music you have purchased from the Google music store.

Additionally you may also be able to store tracks from your hard drive that Google has licence for, even if you’ve obtained them from another retailer (such as iTunes or Amazon) or other alternative ways, such as your own CDs and…well, you get the picture. These would then appear in your Google music library available for stream or download.

How To Listen

Google is obviously going to put the Google Music service into heavy use on its own platforms, and none comes bigger than the soon-to-be world’s most used mobile OS, Android. You’ll be able to stream direct from your handset or download for those areas with less than capable signals.

There is also likely to be a Web-based player (let’s wait and see if it’ll have Adobe technology) so if you can browse to a page anywhere – you can listen. A boon to listen to your tracks when not at home, especially if the browser becomes integrated into devices like the Sonos music system, Revo’s Axis or even Web-aware TVs like Samsung’s UE40C8000.

Full Song Previews and Social Interaction

If you are a big fan of strokey-beard noodling jazz odysseys, you’ll know that a measly 30 seconds is not going to show the squawking genius of Miles to a non-believer. No, you want them to be wrapped up in Bitches Brew for the full 27-odd minutes to appreciate it – and Google hears your plea.

The service aims to offer a full track preview to listeners – just the once mind, so while you can listen to every track on it once, you still need to buy the album to listen to it again. What this means socially is you will be able to recommend a track, album or even playlist to a friend and they can check it out and get to judge each song on its full merits.

This puts the service somewhere between Apple’s Ping and Spotify, and could prove to be the 21st century mixtape.

At the moment, the whole service is shrouded in mystery and nothing has been confirmed. Billboard say that no favours have been made to Google in terms of pricing, with digital albums still costing $7 wholesale, with tracks at 70 cents average.

We’ll wait and see if the vast coffers of the big G will take a hit to get the service off the ground, but if nothing else it’ll give the legions of Android users present and future an excellent integrated music service that will bring devices like the Samsung Galaxy S and HTC’s forthcoming Desire HD into the ‘cool’ arena, and won’t leave their owners longing for Apple’s behemoth.
[Source: BIllboard]

Well Apple think you do, and like a giant hypnotoad they will make you want to by introducing Ping into iTunes 10. In essence Ping adds all this social interactivity to your iTunes / iPod / iPhone/iPad, making it a kind of Twitter for music that Apple hope will help you “discover” (i.e. buy) more music.

It works by updating when you do something in iTunes (or a player on an iOS device), be it buying a track, reviewing an album or simply listening to something. People can then comment or like this action – very Facebook.

You can also be ‘followed’, much like in the Twitter sense, so people who feel you have an impeccable taste in music when you follow Slayer with Vera Lynn can track your Ping movements and “discover” (yes, Apple still means buy) tracks you listen to.

You can post tracks as suggestions for others – a kind of “what do you think of this?” noticeboard – and you can also follow artists with a certain degree of social interactivity coming from them in return, including posts and pictures.

There’s a lot of scope here and to be fair to Apple, it’s a decently implemented social networking system, albeit one piggybacking on iTunes and iOS players. It’s success, though, will depend on how easy it is to use and, crucially, maintain.

There’s no mention of any integration with the established social networks like Facebook and Twitter and certainly we won’t be seeing it outside of Apple circles but it’s a brave move to enter the social arena. Even the giants fall (MySpace) but Apple certainly has the audience and financial clout to make this work.

Want to get in on Ping? You’ll need iTunes 10 from Apple, and on the move you’ll need an iOS 4 device, so that’s at least an iPhone 3G, an iPod touch second generation, or the iPad.

Actually, although this seems like an odd idea at first, it makes a lot of sense for people who’s lives centre around the iPod or iPhone. You can control your iPod through the TV’s remote, which has a similar look and feel to it, and watching videos or photos on your HDTV is much better than staring at your iPod’s screen.

The Teledock TV’s themselves aren’t super-high end, so the iPod dock is the feature, not the quality of the picture. That said, they do offer full HD, 120Hz refresh rate, as well as digital noise reduction, dynamic backlight, three HDMI connections and 1080 24p/30p output.

Oddly, their speakers only have a 10W output, which is a bit weedy, particularly when their main use is to play music from your iPod!

The three JVC TeleDock TVs’ release date is set for Spring 2010, with the TV’s coming in a range of sizes from 32″ to 46″.

[Source: JVC]

In other words, it’s a DVD player, digitial photo frame, home cinema, radio and an MP3 player! Not like Samsung to be so modest with one of their new products!

None of this is what makes the IceTouch stand out, though. As you can see from the pics, the IceTouch’s screen is its unique feature – it’s transparent!

The reason for this is that it’s an AMOLED screen, which makes it super-sharp, crystal clear – and viewable from the front and the back, as you can see form the video below.

It’s also the world’s first touchscreen based on AMOLED technology (that’s more like it – this is Samsung, there had to be a “world’s first” there somewhere!). This makes accessing all your content extremely easy, particularly when the user interface is a variant of the same Touchwiz interface that Samsung uses in its mobile phones.

The IceTouch MP3 player supports tonnes of content formats, so you should be able to watch and listen to whatever yuo want. In particular, it supports the following formats:

Audio

• MP3
• WMA
• OGG
• FLAC
• AAC
• M4A
• WAV
• MP3 HD

Video

• MPEG4
• WMV
• H.264
• Xvid
• Divx

With 8GB and 16GB variants, the glorious looking Samsung IceTouch MP3 player will be out sometime in the first half of 2010.

[Source: Engadget]

In the world of music making, software synths have dominated in recent years, with all manner of old and new synths being emulated on PCs and Macs. Now, though, a new platform might jsut be about to emerge that could potentially change the entire field of music.

That platform is the Nintendo DS, which is the unlikely gadget for the new Korg DS-10 Synth emulator. The DS-10 is software that you install onto your DS and control via your DS’s stylus, letting you play all sorts of synthesized sounds.

What type of sounds? Those of a Korg MS10, no less, a vintage old analogue synth that was cutting edge back in 1978, and which had leads and pipes and even steam controlled oscillators (OK, I made that last bit up!)

Now, vintage analogue synth emulators have been around for years, so why do I say the Korg DS-10 could transform music making? Simple: accessibility. Existing emulators are designed for PCs and Macs, usually as plugins to horrendously complicated music applications.

In contrast, the Korg DS-10 sits on the Nintedo DS and just lets you play music, using the stylus as your instrument. You can create new sounds, compose tunes, play the whole thing back again, and – the best bit – hook up several DS’s together via the DS’s built-in WiFi link and play sweet music from all the connected devices.

The features the DS-10 offers you include:

• Two patchable dual-oscillator analog synth simulators
• Four-part drum machine that uses sounds created with the analog synth simulator
• Six-track (analog synth x 2, drum machine x 4) /16-step sequencer
• Delay, chorus, and flanger sound effects available from the mixing board
• Three note-entry modes: touch-control screen, keyboard screen, matrix screen
• Real-time sound control mode via touch-control screen
• Exchange sounds and songs and play multiple units simultaneously through a wireless communications link

AQI have a demo of the Korg DS-10 in action, so you can hear what it sounds like yourself. Or just watch the video and be amazed at the power of this thing! All for just

Philips has launched its digital audio & video player ‘GoGear (model:SA5245)’. Apart from looking very nice, its most noticeable feature is FullSound, a digital audio algorithm patented by Philips that refines audio output. FullSound apparently brings out the best of their audio system and delivers more life to the music by performing millions of operations before the sound hits your ears. It would seem that as hardware becomes faster companies are using it to full advatage to manipulate the sound into ritcher tones or make the sound appear to come from different directions as with Creative’s ZEN X-Fi.

If like me you have too many wires in your life and you are looking to reducing them before you have a nasty accident you could splash out on the Bluetooth-enabled model (SA5245BT). Both the GoGear models have a 2.8inch QVGA LCD screen and up to five hours video playtime.

All in all a very nice number and not a bad price either. You can find one of these at Amazon for $122.39 or

I can’t wait to try out the Creative ZEN X-Fi, a series of portable media players with all the usual features but it is the built in Wi-Fi and sound manipulation features which have sparked the biggest interest. The Wi-fi in particular will open up the way into the future of potable media player. Read on to find out more.

X-Fi settings

OK, so I am slightly geeky, but I like the idea of being able to change sound in such a way that it appears to be coming from different locations, that’s why the X-Fi Expand particularly appeals to me. But I am not completely ignoring the other X-Fi setting, the X-Fi Crystalizer.

Starting with X-Fi Expand, this makes the sound seem to move away from your ears so it is no longer coming from the headphones but is in fact coming from in front of you. The official line is “X-Fi Expand gives audio a realistic and natural feel”, but it just sounds like a gimmick to me, a very neat gimmick that I like, but not sure how much it will be used after the novelty dies away. X-Fi Crystalizer on the other hand appears to be slightly more useful. Depending on the compression methods used details in the audio files can be lost, X-Fi Crystalizer tries to combat this by “intelligently” restoring those details, it claims to deliver sound closer to the original quality.

Creative Centrale

Now this is a nice piece of software and is tied in with an online application called Public Home Server. Creative Central will enable you to handle all your multi media, so your music, movies and photos, then you can publish them to Public Home Server that will give you remote access to your media files from any where you can get a connection! This is definitly the trend at the moment, access your media where ever and when ever you like, if you get the right software it won’t even limit you on what device you use to access that media. It is becoming less and less a matter of how big is your hard drive in your device but how fast is your contection to your home PC.

No release date or price or anything particularly useful right now. That would be expecting far too much.

[Source: episenter]

You may remember our article on Sanyo’s new waterproof HD TV which enabled you to watch TV in a down poor if you so wished. Well now you can also listen to music while singing in the rain.

This Sentry speaker system can accommodate up to 6 wireless receivers that can be speakers or headphones, the Sentry system is not fussy. You can plug any audio device that has a 3.5 mm headset port directly into the unit for easy plug and play. The transmitter also has built-in USB support which enables you to charge your iPod or MP3 player. What more can I say… it is a joy to behold even when wet.

Available at Amazon for $99.99

The official specifications from Sentry Industries are: