racemate's Full Review: Rio Nitrus Street (1.5 GB) MP3 Player
Updated April 2004 - see end
First off, it's a great idea and a good product. Rave, rave, rave. Go Rio. Of course, like any real product, there's a couple things that could be just a little bit better.
I had a couple real points I was looking for in an mp3 player. First, capacity - I didn't want to have to connect it every day or two for updates, or to go from "gym music" to "bus music" to "work music". Second, no need for expansion cards (which, even with really good deals, easily double the cost of a solid-state player). Third, a really good way to connect to the player - meaning fast, with no buggy software (for Windows only) required. Ideally, this'd be USB mass storage - which lets it show up automagically as a "drive" in Windows, absolutely no need for extra software. (Not that Windows really counts as "no buggy software"... thanks, folks, I'll be here all week.)
The Nitrus looks pretty good for the first two points... 1.5 GB makes it easy to go a week or more, there's pretty good support for playlists and such. However, it does require Rio's software for transfers. Now, I'd heard pretty good things about Rio's (new) Music Manager software. Few if any bugs, useful for keeping track of big collections, more than just a fancy way to stick music on the device, built-in "Rio DJ" for setting up playlists. And I had some Best Buy "rewards" certificates that were about to expire, so it wound up being about the same as the better solid-state players... so I took a chance.
First impression... I *HATE* blister packs. They are far more difficult to get into than they should be. What ever happened to boxes, anyway?
I plug it in, hook up the earbuds (cord's a bit short on those, by the way). It comes with 24 songs already on it, a nice touch, so I start listening... sound quality's pretty good. Hard to evaluate with stuff I've only heard played by the Nitrus on these earbuds, though.
Software: This is probably the weak point of the Nitrus (and of many mp3 players, apparently). There's two included programs that get installed on your computer - Rio Music Manager (RMM) and Rio Taxi. RMM is now Rio's software for all their current products, so they've put some real effort into getting it right. Note: This is based on the latest non-beta software and firmware (2.40 build 9 software, 1.03 firmware - there's a 1.11 in beta, which I haven't tried).
Software installed cleanly. There's suspicious language in the license agreement about "automatic updates may prevent you from playing DRM-protected media, we'll try to let you know if we discover this happening", but I don't have any DRM-protected stuff and don't plan to get any, so meh. Looks good, although it did take a few minutes to scan through my collection (about 1000 mp3s). Scanning seems to be much faster the next time the software's opened (this is also a later version of the software than comes on the CD).
Hook up the Nitrus with the included USB cable, no problems about transferring a song to the device. Now I want to back up the stuff that came on it - there were a couple I liked. At first I tried to drag-and-drop the song from the player to the computer - you drag-and-drop songs from the computer to the player, so why not the other way around? You can still copy songs from the player to the computer - at first, I didn't think it was possible, but it turns out to just be a bad user interface for it. You can right-click on a song (or songs) on the player and "Save As..." to save them somewhere on your hard drive. Your computer's hard drive, not the player's.
Okay, so the software can transfer. What else can it do?
The big thing is playlists. One weak point of the Nitrus (and probably a lot of other players) is that you really can't build playlists on the player. The Nitrus does allow you to pick songs based on artist, album, song, genre, and year - but you can't combine two different artists, and songs are played strictly in alphabetical order (by title). You can also select "new" music that has been added to the player recently. There's no way to randomize the list of songs and mix things up a bit. So, you create a playlist on the computer, using RMM, and then transfer the playlist with the songs. (You still can't re-shuffle the songs in the playlist, either.)
RMM offers decent support for creating playlists. You can select specific artists/albums/songs/genres, or you can use the "Rio DJ", which picks songs to make up a certain length (or total size for all the files). It can select based on a number of different factors - artist, how often you've played a song, "new" music.
Quick comparison to other "music manager" software: It's not quite as good as iTunes in randomly picking based on what you tell it you like (there's no way to rate songs, on either the player or the software). It's more stable than MusicMatch (at least, more than MusicMatch has been for me), but there's no support for the more advanced tagging and "similar music" stuff. It's much better than Windows Media Player, but then, most stuff is.
It does not support importing playlists, or (as far as I can tell) simply copying playlists (.pls or .m3u formats, for instance) onto the device.
It can rip and encode tracks from an audio CD. I haven't actually tried this feature yet. Neither the version of RMM on the CD (2.0?) nor the latest downloaded version (2.4) includes an mp3 encoder - there's a mention in the helpfiles about a "premium upgrade" that'll include an mp3 encoder, but Rio's website suggests instead that the "premium upgrade" is being folded into the next regular update for RMM, "coming soon". Currently it can produce WMA, Ogg, or FLAC output - note that the Nitrus does NOT support Ogg Vorbis, and there's no word in the FAQ on whether it ever will or not.
The other included program is Rio Taxi. This is a much simpler program for moving all types of files around on the portable hard drive. That's about all it does, too. If you transfer songs this way, note that the Nitrus can't "see" the song as a song in order to play it; this is a very generic tool for bringing home two and a half CDs worth of data in the palm of your hand.
The player's firmware: So far, no bugs or crashes. Again, you can't randomize or create playlists, and there's no way to delete songs away from a computer. Everything works, and the menus are well laid out and easy to get around.
Hardware: Very good indeed.
The screen is small but readable (very clear font), the controls are pretty easy to figure out, and the buttons have a nice feel. The size and weight are very comfortable; it's about like a pager or something, easy to tuck into a shirt pocket. As some reviewers have commented, there's a conspicuous absence of a belt clip. It's a nice shade of black.
Controls are based mostly on the "Rio stick" in the middle of the front (face? top?). There's a pair of buttons for volume control (30 steps, from inaudible to blow-your-ears off). There's a menu button and a dial to scroll through menu options - which you can also do with the "Rio stick", so the duplication is a little bit odd. The dial also doubles as a button that allows you to change what's being displayed - you can change from time played (default) to time remaining to equalizer setting to time and date to song file details (format, encoding bitrate, and file size). The Rio stick is possible to use with a glove on; the others less so, but they're not really needed as often once you get things set Just So. The backlight is activated whenever you hit a control button, but there's no button to turn it on separately. One "hidden" feature - there's a multi-lap stopwatch included.
Transfer rates (using firmware version 1.03, RMM 2.40 build 9, and USB 1.1) are about as expected - average of perhaps 20 seconds for a song transfer. That first sync will be a long one if you load it up. The player stays turned on as long as it's connected, even when it's "waiting".
Sound quality - so far I've only used the included Sennheiser earbuds. Sound quality is definitely better than some - very clear sound, no noticeable distortion. The bass isn't overpowering, but it's definitely there. It's definitely at least as good a listening experience as the cheap speakers on my PC. For that matter, it sounds about as good as the PC when it's hooked up to those cheap speakers.
Battery life: It's a little early to say just yet, since I haven't used it through a couple cycles. Rio claims 16-20 hours, and most reviews I've seen have found that to be a reasonable claim. As one reviewer on here has already pointed out, the battery is a rechargeable lithium-polymer, but it is NOT replaceable. Hopefully by the time it goes painfully flat, I'll be looking for an upgrade anyway... ;)
Wishlist, in case folks from Rio ever read this:
* Belt clip, or an included case/sleeve that has a clip. It's small enough and light enough that it fits in coat pockets just fine, but that also means it can fall out of coat pockets just fine.
* Button to activate the backlight
* Randomize/shuffle ON THE PLAYER.
* Drag and drop songs from player to computer (stupid UI problem).
* Replaceable battery - maybe even consider switching to rechargeable AAAs or something.
Conclusion: It's got some minor annoyances, but it's a great little device. The software appears to be pretty solid, the player itself hasn't had any problems, and the annoyances may well be fixed in later updates of the software (using the latest version, currently).
Update, April 2004:
After three months of use, there's only a couple changes to the above. The good one is that it does have a random play (shuffle) mode on the device, and it works pretty well. The bad one is the battery life. The battery life started out at perhaps 15 hours - never measured systematically. This was perfectly adequate. Problem is that apparently it's always discharging the battery slightly - perhaps it's just a very low power mode instead of off, perhaps it's keeping the clock going. It needs to be recharged again within about two days, even if I don't use it. (It does still get about 6 hours of play time from a fresh full charge.) And of course the battery can't be replaced, and it's at the end of the 90 day warranty.
I was expecting a year or more of use before the battery died completely; looks like I should be grateful for another month or two. Well, when it fails for good, I'll replace it with the (very similiar) iRiver iGP-100 I now wish I'd gotten - everything the Nitrus has without the proprietary software.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 200 Recommended for: Athletes - Lightweight and Portable, Perfect for the Gym
1.5 GB HDD plays over 25 hours of MP3 of 50 hours of WMA music Includes Sennheiser earbuds 5-band adjustable equalizer with pre-sets 16-hours continuo...More at Amazon Marketplace
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