By this time next year, you may be able to get more than just your tall, venti, or grande caffeine fix at your local Starbucks. Company chairman Howard Schultz announced this week that within about 12 months, you will “digitally be able to fill up your MP3 player with music” right there in the store.

I never saw any in person, but apparently those CD-burning machines that were removed from stores last year may be replaced with MP3 downloading stations of some kind. In light of the recent addition of the “Starbucks Hear Music” catalog to the iTunes Music Store, many are speculating that these stations will be provided in conjunction with Apple.

If the rumors are true, you can count on leaving your Creative, Microsoft, and SanDisk DAPs at home. Bringing them to Starbucks would indeed be fruitless.

[Seattle Times via Gizmodo]

Here’s proof that McDonald’s should stick to french fries. The fast-food giant recently paired up with Coke for a promotion in Japan to give away 10,000 golden-arch MP3 players. The players came preloaded with 10 tracks and for some of the lucky winners, the QQPass trojan horse! When the McPlayer is plugged into a PC, the malware grabs passwords and other personal details and emails the info to the code’s author. While the exact number of infected devices is unknown, McDonald’s has set up a 24-hour hotline to deal with the issue and promises to send out clean replacements.

[AV Watch]

The next time an mp3 appears in your Gmail inbox, you can listen to it (assuming you know who it’s from of course) without ever downloading the file or even launching a media player. Just click the button beside the file name and a stripped down version of Google Video Player will pop up and play the song. Don’t have a Gmail account? No problem! Just punch this into your favorite web browser: http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=MP3_URL, replacing the “MP3_URL” part with (obviously) the actual URL of the file.

Several bloggers are now using Google’s mp3 wrapper in an inline frame to stream audio onto their sites. Check out a good example of this here.

[Digital Inspiration via jkOnTheRun]

Alice Wang, a BA student at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London, has recently completed a project exploring how digital audio could change the way we value and interact with music. Her creation, the Audio Stick 70MB, may look like a USB thumb drive at a glance, but a closer look reveals an impressive design that incorporates volume controls, a track selector, and album info (artwork, liner notes, etc.). She’s even designed a tall rack that functions as a way to both display and play the sticks.

Although the purpose of the Audio Stick 70MB isn’t to replace CDs, it may not be too long before artists release full albums on similar devices. Alice says that the sticks would hold 15 tracks and could also be sold blank to bring back the good old days of making mixed tapes. Ah, the mixed tape. What better way to woo a classmate or tell someone you’re ready to take your relationship to “the next level.”

[Alice Wang]

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