rane mixer, built in SL unit, firewire port. Pull up to a gig, plug in your iPod. BOOM. All your tracks are accessible. All you'd need is an OEL or LED display on the mixer which allowed you to navigate the tracks on the iPod and that's it. Nothing funky, just PURE VINYL/CD EMULATION.

I like that idea. Companies are nearly there. Numark are bringing out their twin cd player with hard drives built in. You don't even need to connect it to a computer, it rips cds from it's built in drive.

It's time now for the quality companies to put more thought into this. As I've always said, cds are a (bad) way of carrying 1's and 0's. CDs seem more delicate then vinyl sometimes! How many cds have you got that have got mysterious scratches on them when you have handled them like a baby? I can honestly say that not one of my vinyl records has a scratch on them that affects playability. I've had to replace a few of my cds as they have been magically scratched beyond repair.

What I want is a cdj1000mkIII that will not only accept audio from it's mmc card slot (like the pioneer dmp555 does) but also from an iPod (oh, ok then, to keep others happy, any external firewire/usb2 HD)

However, I guess once we start talking about things like that, it's competing with SSL, so I'll shut up now.

;-)

stu