Escient Delivers a FireBall of Digital Music

Escient’s FireBall

by Alan Sheckter, SmartTV & Sound news editor

The Escient Convergence Corp.’s FireBall music system blends your physical CD collection with the latest in digital technology. Through its interface, the FireBall acts as a CD, MP3 and Internet music player, server and controller.

The unit, which comes with a built-in modem and 50-plus button remote, houses a 40GB hard drive, large enough to hold approximately 700 hours of music at 128Kbps, according to Escient. In addition, the Fireball allows you to convert discs from your CD changer into MP3 digital files, as well as burn digital files into physical CDs on its CD-R/RW drive. You can also, via its USB port, download music from the FireBall to portable MP3 players.

Some of FireBall’s intuitive features include automatic cataloging of your entire music collection in an on-screen guide, and an interface that lets you organize and locate your music by artist, album, song, genre and playlist. It is also provides direct access to Internet radio, music-recognition services and periodic software upgrades. FireBall comes with an MSRP of $1,999.