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27 August 2005

Gemini iKey audio-to-USB converter

Filed under: Hardware at 12:33 pm Comments Off on Gemini iKey audio-to-USB converter
ikey

The iKey is a press releease from Gemini with “artist’s impressions” of a new device and some excited hyperbole about what the device can do. Despite their liberal use of words like “revolutionary”, “incredible”, and “take the DJ industry by storm”, the iKey seems to be nothing more than a box that converts analog audio input (via stereo RCA jacks) to digital output (via a USB port). Useful? Perhaps. Incredible? No. And more importantly, it doesn’t seem to exist yet — information from the press releease is on various websites (such as Remix magazine) but not on Gemini’s own website.

They say that the iKey converts input to either WAV or MP3 and sends it to the USB output, which has to have a USB memory key (sold separately) plugged in to save the audio file: “To use the iKEY, simply connect a cable from your headphone jack or any other output source to the RCA inputs, connect to a USB flash drive or mass storage device, select the desired digital audio format, and hit record – it’s that simple! The iKEY lets you choose whether the audio will be converted into MP3 format (with a choice of a 128, 160 and 256kbps bit rate) or the lossless WAV format. Never before has a portable device allowed you to do this without extra hardware and software.” Well, if a USB flash drive isn’t extra hardware then I don’t know what is.

You can see how this device could be useful, but it’s hard to get too excited when we can’t even see a proper photo of it yet.

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