Good sound, awful UI
Written: Nov 07 '04 (Updated Nov 07 '04)
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Pros: Great sound, good size.
Cons: Horrible UI on pc software and Chiba player.
The Bottom Line: Updated: As much as I like the sound, I just can't recommend the Rio given how awful the UI is.
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| dgdahl's Full Review: Rio Chiba Street (256 MB) MP3 Player |
Update: Sorry, I just can't recommend this player. The pc software is just so terrible as to be total crap. Stay away from Rio until they fire their ui engineers and hire people who know what they are doing.
I got a Rio Chiba with 256MB internal and purchased 3 1GB SD cards separately. Why not get a hard-drive based mp3 player? I prefer not to have moving parts. Battery life with solid state mp3 players is supposed to be better.
So I got my little black Chiba and started moving my library over to it. Doing a straight up move from your hard drive to the Chiba is easy. Select the songs you want to transfer to the Chiba and click the arrow button. Wait a bit and you're good to go.
Frustrations arise when you want to make a playlist and move it to the mp3 player. Making a playlist and adding songs is a little left handed but do-able. Getting the playlist copied to the internal or external memory of the mp3 player is about as fun as driving nails into your eyes. Rio's stinking Music Manager software is too stupid to copy just the list you made, but tries to copy over all the songs on the list, even if they are already in the memory.
Why not live without playlists? Well, Rio are not familiar with the idea of nested directories/folders. All of your songs are in the same folder, so if you want to go somewhere in the middle of the 1.256 GB of tunes you have to hit the navigation stick a whole lot of times. Let me be clear: You cannot navigate by album on this thing.
The help with Rio's Music Manager App is wrong. Their directions for creating playlists don't work.
On the good side: The sound is great on Chiba. I rip my mp3's at 160kB/s. I will sacrifice the extra storage for the extra sound quality. I use the Chiba with a set of Sennheiser noise cancelling headphones and am able to ignore all the noise in my office. Now if I could just ignore the people who insist on coming to my cube...
The form factor of the Rio is great too. It's easy to use the buttons, and it's small enough to get lost easily. ;) The display is clear, if not very big. I agree with the criticism of the battery cover: You must align it just right in order for it to snap completely into place. Also, you must remove the battery cover and battery to access the SD card slot.
If you are a person who likes to jump around your music library, you may not like the Chiba: The navigation UI is quite frustrating.
If you are someone who can just hit play and let it go, the Chiba will be to your liking.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 120
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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Epinions.com ID:
dgdahl
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Reviews written: 25
Trusted by: 1 member
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