Now I see why the RIAA is worried
Written: Jun 24 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Convient, Lots of avalible music, good sound quality, small and light
Cons: Expensive, Not able to hold a lot of music,
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| tzimmer25's Full Review: Rio PMP-500 (64 MB) MP3 Player |
Mp3 is the music format that many think will change the face of the music industry forever and with the way it's currently developing, I would have to agree. For those of you that don't know, Mp3 is a way of encoding a music file so that it remains at near CD quality, but becomes about a megabyte per minute as opposed to the ten megabytes per minute you get on a raw file from a CD. The main advantage is that you can get files off the internet from places like Napster, therefore explaining the RIAA's problem with this technology, but that's another story... The Rio 500 is a great product, but you have to keep in mind that it is an early version of a developing technology. Buying a Rio 500 would be like buying in Apple Newton (Arguably the first PDA on the market) not in that it is probably a product that will not become mainstream and cease to be produced, but in that it is a great piece of technology that has just not become wildly popular yet. It comes with 64 MB of internal memory and I get about an an hour and eight minutes worth of music on it when I am encoding at 128 Kbps (The higher the number, the higher the quality). One of the best things about the Rio is the fact that it never skips, because it has no moving parts. That means that you can take it to the gym, etc. I have taken it with me running several times and it is great. It's also so small that you can put it just about anywhere. Here just to give you an idea of it's size I will draw it out for you:
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hopefully you you can see that. It turns out in most of the fonts I tried. Anyway, The Rio is also pretty light. It weighs about the same amount as nine or ten quarters. Everything on the Rio is controlled by a universal knob. Through it you can access things like whether you want it to repeat, chose songs randomly, backlight options and there is even an equalizer, which is a really nice feature. If you want you can organize your music into folders and bookmark parts of tracks (especially nice if you get a book on there.) Battery life is pretty good, but it is not quite the 13 hours advertised. I normally get a week or so of use out of it before I have to change the battery. Transferring music from you computer to the Rio really takes a lot out on the Battery. This is a product where rechargeable batteries would be greatly advised. Of course, in order to get music on your Rio, you have to take it from a computer first. The Rio comes with a USB cable, so you can just plug one end into the Rio and the other end into either a USB enabled PC or, unlike the Rio 300, a mac. I am use a mac, so I use a program called Soundjam MP3, which in itself is great. If you use a mac, I highly suggest that you update to the full version of Soundjam. Everything works through a very user friendly interface. All you have to do to get music on to your Rio is drag and drop from either your playlist or the finder. The Rio window automatically pops up when the Rio is plugged in. I never had any problems with the Rio not understanding files. To right this report I decided that I had better get an understanding of the Windows side of this since that is what most of the world uses. Diamond produces a piece of software called RioPort Audio Manager. So, I got on a Fujitsu and downloaded the connection software. Once I got it up and Running I downloaded a song from Napster and tried to put it on my Rio which was successful even though It took longer to Upload than Soundjam. I then tried to get another song and once I had it audio Manager told me that It was not a valid format and I could not put it on my Rio. I was curious about this, since I had never had this happen before on my computer. I went home and sent him three of the Mp3's I had previously put on my Rio through my computer. The next day, when I tried to put the songs on my Rio through his computer, it would not recognize and let me upload one of the three Mp3's. I don't know why this is. I also notice that it did not encode Mp3's as fast even though his computer was 500mhz and mine was 300 mhz (iBook). My guess though, is that this had more to do with the hardware than a problem with the software. Except for these problems the Rioport Audio Manager worked fine. All in all, the Rio 500 is a great product, but if you get it, you need to realize that this is very much a developing technology. That means that the current generation of devices will seem very dated in a short period of time. If you are looking for an Mp3 player, the Rio has a great value . Plus,It sure is convenient !
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
tzimmer25
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Member: Thomas Zimmerman
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 1 member
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