Olive Media Products on Thursday introduced Symphony, a standalone audio device that stores music on its 80GB hard drive and delivers it to a stereo system through its digital output. It can also wirelessly stream audio to up to five rooms simultaneously and can create music discs with its built-in CD burner. In addition, it features a USB port so that users can plug in their iPods and update them with it.

Symphony can also stream music to or from a Mac or PC, in addition to being able to record music from vinyl records or cassette tapes. The unit offers a 32-bit PowerPC processor and encodes music in lossless quality. It includes an integrated CD database that identifies, tags and archives music CDs and also comes with Playlist, Mac OS X software for managing a classical music collection. Playlist includes a wide variety of information about classical composers and their music.

Olive also offers Preload, a service that loads the user's music to Symphony for free. Users specify that they want Preload when they order a Symphony unit and Olive sends out a Fed Ex shipping label. They send their CDs to the company and receive them back with Symphony, which has been loaded with the content of their discs. While the process of loading the music is a free service, users must pay freight and insurance costs for sending the CDs.

Olive will ship Symphony in mid-August with an US$899 price tag.

Symphony