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The "Throwing it off the balcony" part is just an extreme version of a common fix for stuck harddrives. Giving a dead drive, especially one that is "ticking", a good firm smack will often get it working again. Works best on small (2.5" or smaller) drives. I've resurrected quite a few drives with the same trick, including the one in my Rio Karma, as someone suggests here at riovolution . The way it works is sometimes the heads and/or platters will get stuck, possibly due to suction between the two, and the smack frees them. It often causes minor physical damage (a couple bad blocks), and a drive resurrected this way's days are probably numbered, but its great for fixing drives long enough to get the data off, or in the case of devices with nothing overwhelmingly important on them (like mp3 players) simply getting a few more weeks/months/years of use out of them.

Good old Rio Karma does (all flac's levels 0-8)... as well as mp3, Ogg Vorbis, and, most prominently for me, gapless playback for all of these formats. Oh yeah, and it's platform-independent with a network jack in the dock and the Java version of Rio's Music Manager software. When oh when will another player with these features hit the market?

It has a far superior interface to iPod, IMHO, with it's nipple joystick/scroll wheel combination. It's also upgradable to 30GB (no Dremel required), 40GB http://forums-riovolution.com/index.php?showtopic= 7017 (Dremel required ;) and now there's 60GB Hitachi drives in the same form factor as the 40GB.

I haven't had a HDD go bad, or had those notorious 'unrecognized errors' since I upgraded the software.

I'd still rather have my Karma than any iPod.

Now if only it had a shiny, pretty, machined-aluminum case.

You can slip in a 40Gb drive but its just a few millimetres too thick to properly close the Karma up again. Riovolution has plenty of pictures of the operation to install it and nearly close it up again.

http://forums-riovolution.com/index.php?showtopic= 4109

Basically, you have to whack the unit hard enough that it turns itself off and restarts. Sure, it's unsettling and even embarassing if you have to sit there in a rush-hour subway train spanking a lump of plastic for ten minutes, but it works. And the strangest part of it all: each time you spank it into submission, it will be a significantly longer period of time before it crashes again. After the fourth and last spanking session, it hasn't locked up once in the past five months.

As for the upside, it has several nice features. The author of the review failed to mention one of the highlights of the Karma-dock's ethernet jack - that it can be used to communicate with any computer that can run Java apps. This turns out to be great, because while the management software can only be installed on windows machines, the Java applet that the Karma serves up via HTTP can be run on Linux and OSX machines. When I get into the office (which is a primarily Mac environment), I just drop it into its cradle, have it DHCP-obtain an IP address (an automatic procedure), fire up the applet from my Power Mac, and I'm free to manage it.

On the usability side, I've been extremely pleased with the Karma. I never quite understood why all of the manufacturers have banded behind Apple's design of placing the display above the main control cluster. It results in the center of gravity being above your hand, making the device much more likely to slip or be knocked out of your grasp. On the Karma, the controls are placed above the display, so that your thumb wraps around the Karma's upper edge and the entirety of its mass is cradled in the palm of your hand. It might look counterintuitive, but I think that's largely because all of the other players out there have the scheme reversed.

The firmware is nice, with three user-adjustable 3-band EQ settings slots that you can flip through to best suit the genre of music you're listening to at the time. The main "menu" button on its face can be customized to drop you at one of several menu levels. For example, if you tend to select music by genre, the main menu button can be set to take you right there instead of to the root level menu. The GUI is consistently themed throughout, and while not as minimal as the iPod's, is not aesthetically offensive. One feature I found very cute was the ability to set the play screen (which you'll be looking at 90% of the time) to be dominated by a pair of mostly useless but amusingly retro-styled VU meters. Unlike the iPod, the Karma *IS* capable of gapless playback, which is great if you listen to a lot of mixed compilations or live performances.

I have only two gripes personally with the unit:
1) The setting for "shuffle"/"normal" playback is buried several levels deep in the menu system.
2) The unit has a 4pin jack next to its headphone jack which is obviously intended for an in-line remote control, but no such item exists. Pooh.

HTH in your buying decisions.

No, I want an iPod because the Rio I bought was a piece of shit and broke too quickly, and then they replaced it with another piece of crap.

Rumor has it that Mass Storage support is underway for the Karma. There are even a few tantalizing hints from the Rio engineers themselves on those forums. No specific dates though.

Here's a thread on a big discussion on headphones:
Headphone discussion

J

this is somewhat of a pain, because it means you have to carry the taxi CD with you if you want to use the handdrive feature.. which means you wont randomly be at a friends house, see some files you want, and transfer them (unless you alwys plan on having the cd with you)

I'm 90% sure my info is correct, unless they fixed this really recently. They have said that they will fix this though

check out riovolution and riovolution forums for some good info

I would think twice about buying a karma after reading the support boards. It seems to be very, very poorly built.