Music Thing: The Gemini iKey
Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:
This week, the world's music geeks are still in mourning after Bob Moog's death, but those of us who aren't despondently tweaking our modular synths are wondering about a confusing new product called the Gemini iKey.
Gemini are a well established mid-level DJ-gear company, but this is the first time they've produced something like the iKey—a mobile sound recorder, but with no on-board storage. Instead, it plugs into any USB flash drive or hard disk, and can save MP3 or WAV files in real time. So that's two boxes and two cables before you record a note.
No word on whether it can play back the audio, or sampling rates. No sign of mic preamps, let alone phantom power. The press release says ?Never before has a portable device allowed you to do this without extra hardware and software.? Intriguingly, this particular unit appears to be useless without? extra hardware and software.
At $229, unless the iKey has something very clever hidden away, it?s hard to see it luring many punters away from the M-Audio Microtrack or Edirol R-1, which are both flash-based recorders with displays, preamps and headphone jacks. They both cost around $400 but appear to be so much more powerful than the iKey.
But if someone could produce this kind of box for under $50, it would be a neat way to turn your iPod (or a $20 memory stick) into a semi-pro digital recorder. Of course, if Apple could get past their bootlegging paranoia, a simple software upgrade would do the same thing, as Podzilla users know.
The final nail in Gemini?s coffin is the name. If you?re thinking, ?Surely someone has already produced a product called iKey,? then you?re right, many times over. There are two entire ranges of keyboards (one industrial, one mac-friendly), a system of USB keys for locking workstations, and numerous bits of shareware.
Robert Moog wouldn?t have been impressed.
