Fortunately, there’s a nice cafe near my house. For those of you interested in these Buffalo wooden speakers, however, you should know that they work without batteries. That’s convenient, although you shouldn’t expect boombox thump. [Buffalo via Akihabar]

Rather than merely plugging in through USB, the BassJump uses proprietary software to remix all audio coming out of your laptop, essentially treating those tinny integrated speakers as tweeters while the BassJump handles the lows.

I can’t believe that this solution works better than simply plugging in a whole new 2.1 speaker system, but I must admit, the Mac Mini styling coaxes my fanboyism to at least give the idea a shot. $US80 and available now. [BassJump]

At any rate, the Panda head can connect to any computer via USB, or directly to your MP3 player via a 3.5mm audio plug. Rotating the Panda’s ears controls volume and bass. [Gadget4all via Geekalerts via Technabob]

A few days ago, we found out that Apple Corps and EMI would finally release the Beatles’ catalogue in a digital format. It’s not that we couldn’t have just purchased CDs and ripped them – that’s what everyone’s been doing for years now – it’s just that it felt like progress. In reality, it was just the near-random actions of someone who has no idea what’s going on, at all. From the Guardian via Ars, Paul McCartney’s view on selling the Beatles’ music online:

“I met [EMI's chief executive] on a plane once,” said McCartney. I said: ‘What is the problem? I want to do it, we all want to do it.’ And he explained that in the deal that we want, they feel exposed. If [digitised Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, ‘Now you recompense us for that.’ And they’re scared of that.”

Just to be clear, Paul McCartney says he wants to sell music online, but the he’s worried that someone could conceivably download it, upload it back to the internet, and open the floodgates to piracy. As opposed to just uploading the higher-quality digital files you’re selling to people on Apple-shaped USB drives right now, or on CDs, more than a decade ago. McCartney expects an agreement by which he would be compensated if people share his music, as if it would be somehow correlated with the release of Beatles’ tracks online, which EMI — no stranger to releasing music online — is scared of because it’s insane.

Poor Paul! Someone should tell him, you know, about all the wapping. [Ars Technica]

UPDATE: From anonymised (not anonymous) source who researched similar subjects in the past, a possible explanation:

It’s not the music for sale they’re worried about but the raw remasters (this is why McCartney specifically refers to an employee potentially uploading the music). I don’t know how much you’ve read about the making of [Beatles Rock Band] but they went to incredible lengths to protect the masters. It was only towards the end of the project that Harmonix received the (heavily encrypted) music they needed; before then, Apple Corps had been sending them “dirtied-up” copies of the music just in case it was intercepted halfway.

The real threat from McCartney and the other Beatles (and er, spouses of Beatles) is that if, somewhere in the process of turning their music into iTunes-friendly files, the MASTERS get leaked… then they will sue the pants off of EMI. And EMI allegedly said they are in such a precarious financial position that they do not want to take the risk of getting hit by a lawsuit that could take the company down.

An alternate theory, which still doesn’t quite work. If masters leaked to the internet, presumably they’d be encoded in something like FLAC at best, which would be indistinguishable from the files the Beatles are OK with selling on USB drives right now. Or if this refers to the recording’s component parts, like the ones used to create Rock Band, still: This seems avoidable. And in either strain of paranoia: Paul McCartney doesn’t understand the internet. (And possibly other things, too!)

[Make]

For sale November 30 in a limited run of 200 units, the kits run around $US125 (plus the cost of buttons, as I understand). As for the final built product, it features 16 programmable buttons and LEDs that allow you to cue your MIDI samples with all the finesse of button-mashing Shredder to death.

The only possible point of improvement would be a coin slot mandating occasional quarter-purchased continues. Or, you know, the addition of even more buttons (which is technically feasible with some modification to the kit). [djtechtools via MAKE]

Too bad they can only play German folk music and tangos. [Santa Fe via Likecool]

Olive’s music players are the kind of crazy high-end AV hardware that peasants like you and I shouldn’t even be reading about, let alone contemplating. The 4 HD rips CDs to its huge 2TB hard drive, in addition to streaming from a PC to be played through crazy high-end speakers. It’s got a nice 4.3-inch touchscreen, and it’s pretty nice-looking. So what’s new? Well, the ports are all gold-plated, and the 4 HD adds a DAC the Opus N4 didn’t have:

* Proprietary, high resolution DAC featuring Texas Instrument’s 192khz/24-bit Burr-Brown PCM1792A.
* DAC may be used as an outboard DAC for any digital music source. With 24-bit/192kHz oversampling, noise and distortion are ultra low resulting in incredible purity in both high frequencies and low-level detail.

Basically it’s a super simplified music player (just music, mind you, no other media) for incredibly rich old people for whom the CD is something they’ve just gotten comfortable with in the last six months or so. It’s pretty, we’ll give it that. It’s available now for $US2000. [Olive]

*DISCLAIMER: That’s Strapya’s official promotional YouTube video title. I wanted to tell you all about Strapya’s ultra-thin Music Card player, but I’m having an extremely hard time concentrating after watching this spot. Advertising genius or marketing suicide? You decide.

I don’t know if they are going to sell a lot of these 5mm thin, 318g 2GB MP3 players — which come with a built-in speaker and headphones — but after watching the video, my faith in Humanity has dropped from negative to imaginary numbers. [Strapya via Crunchgear]