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Rio Riot and Lyra Personal Jukebox
dschuetz writes: "SONICblue has the new Rio Riot up on their home page. It looks to me like an iPod killer -- 20 GB hard drive, very nice interface (better than Apple's), built-in FM tuner, powerful "DJ" functions, Lithium Ion batteries. And, at $399, it's priced competitively. The only question is -- how big is this thing? SONICblue has lots of other great systems out there, like the ReplayTV and Rio Receiver (which runs Linux), so the possibilities for hacking and otherwise extending this device are very good." Another submitter sends: "MP3 Newswire has a story on the RCA LYRA Personal Jukebox, a 20GB MP3/mp3PRO player that is the first portable to use the updated digital music compression scheme co-developed by its parent company Thompson. The new Lyra sells for $299. In related news, SonicBlue has released its first jukebox style player, also a 20GB unit called the Rio Riot that sells for $399. Both articles have pictures of the new players."
Sure, it's got a 20gig drive and an FM radio, but given the fact that it still uses a USB connection, how long is it gonna take me to transfer all my fmp3's?
I, for one, will stick with my iPod.
-- Your local friendly mad scientist-in-training
It looks good, if it really is the size of, or slightly larger than the ipod, I'd definitely think of buying it. Unfortunately, it's limited to USB, which mostly negates the ability to use it as a portable hard drive/ transfer music to it quickly. If a company finds a way to release something the size of an ipod with firewire, but useable on pc's, I'd definitely get it, as it has so many uses.
I doubt it! Looks way too big and is still using USB . . .
Close, but not firewire. It's reasonable to assume that Apple will release a bigger iPod sometime soon, if so, then this is moot.
What it needs to be an iPod killer is Firewire. The iPod's 5gb is plenty for most people, I know I wouldn't need any more than that, as I only have about 1-2gb of MP3s.
Besides, do you want to copy 20gb worth of songs over USB?
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
The iPod is so popular because of the size. This thing uses a laptop harddrive like all the others. The iPod it self could fit inside these mp3 players that use laptop drives. It also uses USB. Please, do the math on how long it would take to transfer 20 gigs on USB.
Until they makesomething with as nice an interface as the iPod, I won't buy one. And it needs to have FireWire.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Is that a USB 1 or 2 interface on the thing? iPod's big advantage is its FireWire port. How long will it take you to put your 20GB onto the new device?
Does every new device have to be deemed "An iPod Killer"?
--Mike
The Riot is one slick looking machine. A lot nicer, IMNSHO, than the iPod. From what I've heard about it, the interface will be better as well. Unfortunetly, $399 is still a bit steep. Not that I don't think mp3 players are 'nifty' and all, but I've got a 12-disc changer in my car, a 60-disc changer in my room, and a laptop that has mp3s ripped from most of the CDs I own. And even for people who don't have quite as much audio equipment (or audio capable equipment) I've never quite understood the need to have something like 50 albums available all the time, anywhere.
Not that's it not something good to have, just seems like there are better things to buy for $400.
If you need to interpret my post, then you don't get it.
Not only does it have only USB rather than firewire, it also lacks the software integration and sheer coolness factor of the iPod (which is able to run off a single cable)
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
When the storage capacity of these things increase beyond gigabytes, USB is just too slow.
The iPod sells a lot because of good design and user interface. The Riot looks black and ugly to me.
The iPod can be used as a firewire harddrive.
It doesn't seem to me that the Riot "kills" the iPod in any way at all.
This thing is no iPod killer. The great thing about the iPod is that I can put it in my pocket, and the firewire interface is so fast that I don't need to put ALL of my MP3s on it: it takes only seconds to load a fresh collection.
With 20gb of storage and a $400 price tag why aren't these machines pda's as well as mp3 players. Even if they didn't have a screen you could use a touch pen on that would be nice...
Great improvement in storage size - but no firewire. USB blows.
-- Jay Brewer -- http://www.blogpire.com
That's funny. I had heard that the iPod was lame. Why would we need an iPod killer?
(In any case, it's still using USB. That's gotta be painful for moving 20GB of music...)
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Once someone releases one that will play my Vorbis files, I'll buy one. I re-encoded my whole collection into Vorbis, and now I'm much happier (re-encoded from the CD, not from mp3's).
Until then, I'll do without one.
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No mp3 player that expects us to deal with USB is an "iPod killer"
Can this thing be used as an external drive?
Battery life?
Interface with iTunes or does it require its own software?
Still USB.... blah.
what is it with all this non-mac hardware? it's like apple have hired *all* the good minimalist product designers in the world and every other product has to be designed with virtually no sense of style[1]. it's the same for all the iMac-a-like computers and even mobile phones. can someone please design an mp3 player with reasonable specs (which this seems to have) and doesn't look like a NURBS experiment gone wrong?
[1] noted exeptions: palm's computers and the sony playstation 2
free (as in mp3s) electronic music
It even says so in the linked pages...
(Just some schlub who works for Thomson, although in a very different branch.)
Anybody notice the fact that they neclected to state the average battery life? In addition, it is USB, and the interface seems to be a little too similar to the iPod's to me...hmm...
That it uses a 20GB hard drive means that it is at least twice the size. The 5gb hard drive used in the iPod is significantly smaller than the 2.5inch form factor required by the 20gb drive.
The Riot has a USB interface... the iPod uses FireWire (1394b). End result? You can completely replace the contents on your iPod in less than 15 minutes. Even loading 5gb onto the Rio is going to take something like 10 hours -- 20gb would likely take something like *two days*.
It is unbelievably handy/convenient/cool to be able to reload your entire portable music collection in a matter of minutes. I can get up in the morning and select 500+ tracks -- 50 albums or several playlists (depending on how I have things organized) -- based on my mood, desires, whatever... and the iPod is completely reloaded and ready to go by the time I'm out of the shower and ready to catch the train!
All in a device that slips conveniently into a pocket, is light weight, and incredibly tough. Did you know an iPod bounces when you drop it? Mine does-- and it still works fine.
Not too mention that having a 5gb FireWire hard drive in my pocket has proven to be damned convenient on numerous occasions. My iPod was used as a temporary holding spot for data or for sneaker net transfers no less than 4 times last week simply because it was the fastest and most convenient way to move the data around! USB wouldn't have cut it-- try moving 1gb of data across a USB bus in under a minute. (Sure, USB 2.0 can do it-- but who has USB 2.0 support on their MP3 player?)
Don't get me wrong-- the Riot is *very cool*. But it isn't an iPod killer. They are completely different products.
Personally, I don't need an FM tuner and really don't want a device that doesn't fit in a pocket.
There will be those that will reply with 'but do you *really* swap your entire playlists on a regular basis? I don't and I don't miss it...'
You can now buy a portable AM/FM cdrom player that'll play CDR's you burn at Wal-mart for $39.99. In a few months you'll be seeing versions of these things that'll have support for MP3's burned on CDR's.
Doesn't this make spending $$$ for a Rio Riot or Lyra Personal Jukebox a wee bit silly?
I think iPOD is already over killed, I mean, your battery can't even last long enough for all the sounds, I think a perfect mp3 player should have:
Decent form factor - Small is good, but too small is stupid.
Decent Storage - 512MB flash is good enough with matching battery life.
Mutliple format support - OGG, WMA, MP3, MP3Pro
Expansion - SD Expansion is good enough.
That's it, that's all I am asking for.
kawai
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>>There will be those that will reply with 'but do >>you *really* swap your entire playlists on a
>>regular basis? I don't and I don't miss it...'
Yes-- but do you NOT do it because you wouldn't or because you can't conveniently? In my experience, the use of a device is often defined by the limitations of the device. That you can't conviently swap out all the content doesn't mean you wouldn't do it if you could!
I swap the entire contents 2 to 3 times a week, on average. I have 100+ GB of high bitrate mp3s encoded from my CD collection and typically grab some random 4.5GB cross section of that ever few days based on mood, desire, or context.
Reading the early comments and seeing everyone complaining about it being USB.
Take a look at most "pee-cee"s today, how many have Firewire? Most people don't have Firewire, they do have usb though.
So stop saying that everything needs to be firewire, yes it will take a while to fill a 20gig mp3 player with a usb connection, but how many times are you going to need to reload 20 gigs of music, if your like me you get a few cds a month and rip them at the same time, at that point I have between 2 and 4 hundred megs, and that doesn't take long to transfer with a usb connection when I only have to do it once or twice a month.
And on a side note, does this thing act as a portable hard drive? I know some of the harddrive/mp3 players do and that would make it even more useful, with my 11 or 12 gigs of mp3 and a divx video or 6 in the rest of the space i'd be set, even my parents have usb on their pc.
Um, geez, guys, the first time you copy over ALL your mp3s, why not do it overnight? I mean, this isn't exactly rocket science. How many of you who are complaining about the USB interface on the Rio Riot still use 10 megabit ethernet?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I can fill my iPod in about 10 minutes . . . I could fill the Rio Riot in about 3.8 hours . . .
.Decisions . . .
Hm? Decisions . .
I really don't see this as an iPod killer in anyway!
After reading the article, and reading sonicblue's page, i still couldnt find two key specs for this machine, size and weight. I really think that this is because that the iPod is much smaller and weighs much less.
I own an iPod, and I prefer having a tiny device, that i can fit in my pocket, or even in the cellphone compartment on my bag. Also, the riot is still USB, i couldnt even imagine how long it would take to fill up the drive. I have a hard time waiting for the three or four minutes it takes to fill up my ipod.
Everyone also says that the 5gb on the ipod is not enough, and i thought that also, until i got one. I can hold around 700 songs encoded at 192k on the hard drive, which is 2 days worth of music. Now when are you going to listen to the complete 8 days worth of music on your Riot?
I swear I've seen this device before. My younger brother used to play video games on it. It had the thinnest cartridges... And as everyone's pointed out, iPod killer my hairy ass...
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
...they avoid giving its dimensions among the specs -- or showing it in a user's hands? If this thing is much bigger than the iPod, then the hell with it. And FireWire is a necessity.
And the Lyra -- hell, the picture in the article makes it look like it's about the size of my head! Kidding, but the article says it weighs twice what the iPod does, so the hell with it too.
That said, when someone ships one of these suckers can copy songs over FireWire unit-to-unit, I'll hock my iPod and switch!
I'd much rather have a wireless network connected device capable of streaming the music off of my home machine and various other places on the net based off of my listening preferences. The thing I like about the radio is its ability to introduce me to new music. The thing I hate about the radio is its complete inability to know my preferences. Freeamp is a step in the right direction, but I still haven't managed to get any decent recommendations from it. Music Match makes an attempt as well, but their interface is practically unusable to me. And neither recommendation system is in the form of a net-enabled portable unit yet. *sigh*
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
MediaFour had a demo of XPlay at MacWorld, running on XP, and I have to admit it was pretty sexy.
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
"That it uses a 20GB hard drive means that it is at least twice the size."
Wow, yeah, it's at least three times the size too. It's actually exactly four times the size, however.
Why, if you had 20GB of MP3s in your pocket, would you ever want to listen to FM radio?
I'm holding out for the inclusion of "Amplitude Modulation" technology. I read a preview of it in the July 1899 issue of American Electrician-- it looks like it will be *the* format for christian and sports talk broadcasts.
Cache Rules Everything Around Me
iPod killer? Yeah, right. There seems to be no dimensions information on sonicblue's site... hmm. I wonder why not? It looks like a damn Atari Jaguar, and it probably has a 3.5" HD, making it MUCH cheaper to make (as well as bigger and heavier) than the iPod.
And as others have already cogently pointed out:
USB.
Let's see. USB is 12 megabits per second. Let's say that's 1 megabyte per second.
Now, 20 gigabytes is 20,000 megabytes. So it'd take 20,000 seconds to fill the hard drive in the Riot. How long is 20,000 seconds? Well, let's do some math here.
There are 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour. That makes 3600 seconds in an hour. 3600 goes into 20,000 roughly 5 times.
So it'd take about 5 HOURS to fill the thing, not TWO DAYS! Let's get our math straight first before we make declarative statements about the product.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
bah, i'm still kickin it hardcore with my Diamond Rio...old school baby. 32MB? who would ever need more than that?
I saw a picture of this being handled on TechTV, and it's much bulkier than the iPod. The iPod is a far more convenient form-factor for a portable player, IMO, and I predict that the Rio Riot's sales will suffer for that reason. That said, it has an interesting feature that the iPod lacks: it will create a favorites list based on your usage, which the TechTV guy loved.
In terms of interface, I find it hard to believe that the iPod can be easily topped. I've had mine since thanksgiving, and have been fascinated by it.
Not only is it awesome as an mp3 player (excellent sound quality, great battery life, fast connection, high capacity), or as an external hd (I've used it to fix broken macs by booting off it). What I find most impressive of all is the fact that its ui is unbelievably efficient at getting you to the song, playlist, artist, album, etc. you want to hear.
In terms of usability and 'learning curve', my grandfather figured out how to use it in about 3 minutes, without my telling him anything about it. Granted, he limited himself to the gigabyte-or-so that I have of classical music, but still, he was impressed at how easy it was to use.
The Riot seems to be a slick little machine, and its 20 gb are very impressive. But, as people have already mentioned, 20 gb over USB are worth more than a few coffee breaks' wait...
Not to discredit the Riot's interface, but the jog dial doesn't let you go all the way around, which wouldn't let you really speed up (crucial element of iPod's navigation), and the buttons aren't in the center of the dial, but off to the side, so you'd have to take your thumb off the dial, move it up or down and push accordingly, as opposed to having the main button right there and the others right around the dial. In addition, the Riot seems to require 2-handed operation. On the other hand, though, the larger screen is impressive, and the hints at a graphical interface as opposed to a text-driven one make me quite curious.
The fact that I can do everything I could possibly want to with one hand on my iPod (with one finger, mind you) is one of the most fascinating aspects of the interface. And FireWire makes it all manageable. As soon as I get a new CD and rip it, I update my playlists and within seconds I'm good to go, new music and all. I'm very happy with my iPod, as you could have guessed. But it would be stupid to say that it's unsurpassable. It's just very difficult, but my eyes are open...
You can completely replace the contents on your iPod in less than 15 minutes.
400Mb/sec / 8 = 50MB/sec 5000Mb/50Mb/sec = 100 sec 100 seconds actually. Not that this negates any of the good points you brought up in your post, but damn. Just a little over a minute and a half. You could replace an entire 20gb hard drive in a little over 6.5 minutes.
I'm not too sure about the transfer speed of USB but I really like the Rio DJ function. RioDJ basically chooses songs for you (a supplement to personal playlists) by frequency of play, newly added music, songs of a certain decade, at random, etc... I hate wading through 2000 songs, because I end up playing them same 10 or so each time around. I don't think a function like this (of automated playlists) exists on the iPod. So, that's a plus.
What I want to know is this: When will we get a good, preferably in-dash, hard drive based MP3 player for the car? You know, it could be done many ways, actually. Any of these companies could easily adapt the power supply for these devices to a standard 12 volts and then make the hard drive portion removable to bring in house and "sync up" via usb/firewire, whatever.
This would preferably also have a CD player in dash that could play regular as well as MP3 cds.
Hell, they could actually create a trunk mounted MP3 unit designed for use in car, similar to car CD changers.
I guess there's the Rio Car, but this is a little pricey a (imho) rather ugly design.
You see all sorts of kits with small computers mounted in trunks hooked up though power inverters, etc. You could also get a cigarette lighter adaptor for any of these jukeboxes. But none of these are eloquent solutions to a problem that really already HAS a solution.
Message To Big Audio Company: I want my entire (400+) CD collection in my dash or trunk in MP3 format. I want large drives (20gigs +). I want it cheap ( $600), I want it pretty. I want it flexible. (Upgrades/Add-ons?) And I want it NOW!
I did a quick comparison of the old iPod to Sonic Blue's new Rio RIOT. Although tech specs are still forthcoming, the Flash technology tour of the Rio RIOT made it easy to tell that this is absolutely an iPod killer.
old iPod: One Boring Scroll Wheel, 5 buttons
Rio RIOT: Scroll Wheel, Game-Boy Pointer, and five buttons, including two on the left side for volume!
old iPod: IE1394 (what issat?)
Rio RIOT: USB! Everyone has it! Soon it will be five times as fast with USB2 technology!
old iPod: looks like a zippo, sized like pack of cigarrettes
Rio RIOT: ergonomically styled like Game Boy Advance, in sleek charcoal plastique!
old iPod: select by artist, album, or manual playlist
Rio RIOT: intellegent audio wizard detects your favorites and plays them back for you!
old iPod: made by Apple, a company going out of business
Rio RIOT: produced by Sonic Blue, a recognized leader in MP3 technology!
I think the message is clear. Sonic Blue has an iPod killer on it's hands with the Rio RIOT. Thank you Slashdot for letting us know quick!
The Rio Riot seems like a good idea, but I'd personally like to see a wireless NIC and some P2P software built in. Imagine sharing files automatically by just walking around...
400 dollars is a lot to pay for a 20 gig hard drive and some electronics. I got a solution to the price problem.
Look at your hard drive, just grab one, any of them. Turn it over, thats nice.. Now look at the electronics on the other side.
I see a 256k ram buffer chip. I see a microcontroller. I see various other parts and pieces that tell me that with a few changes in the PCB layout, there is NO reason hard drives couldn't be factory shipped with the ability to play MP3's. The hard drive im looking at is an ancient quantum 240 meg drive too. Just add your own battery and case and voila.
If maxtor, seagate, or any other ppl from a hard drive company is reading this post, please pressure you boss into doing this. It would give you a place to sell hard drives other than in computers.
The Riot has a USB interface... the iPod uses FireWire (1394b). End result? You can completely replace the contents on your iPod in less than 15 minutes. Even loading 5gb onto the Rio is going to take something like 10 hours -- 20gb would likely take something like *two days*.
That's FUD.
It took me 11 hours to put all 34 gigs of my music on an external USB drive for my car.
You've bough into Job's marketing hype. He's managed to convince you that the Firewire interface alone is enough to overlook the price premium.
Yes, the iPod looks cool, and transfers files fast, but it costs way too much compared to what you get with this Rio Riot.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Everything has to be compared violently to Apple, eh? Kill the iMac and kill the iPod! :)
What might be a killer product but not an iPod killer is the Jukebox Multimedia - Portable Entertainment Center. Archos makes some interesting products. I have an Archos Jukebox 6000 but now use an iPod -- its nice but the size and firewire device of the iPod make it my choice. The Jukebox Multimedia - Portable Entertainment Center is a handheld entertainment center, which combines an MP3 and WMA music player and recorder, plus built-in microphone, photo album and carousel, still camera and camcorder, plus video player and recorder according to their web site. The player has a 10 Gig hard drive. It uses USB 1.0, USB 2.0 and Firewire for transfering information back and forth. It even has a little LCD window to view pictures and movies on the device. Looks like it is the same size as the Riot. Could be a nice data wallet/purse.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
n/t, just mod 'em up. It's informative....
It's not as beautifully simple as an iPod, but it's not ugly either.
;)
;)
If the picture of it sitting next to headphones is to scale, it's about the size of a videocassette.
It uses USB instead of FireWire, but as much as I love my iPod, that's not as big an argument as some people would have you think. Once you get the entire library on there (spend an hour or so with USB), everything else is just delta updates.
A 20GB hard drive is NICE. I'm already resenting managing the playlists on my pod to keep under 5GB. On the other hand, it ensures I only hear my favourite music on the road
The price isn't really competitive, so basically what you're getting is a much larger hard drive in a much larger package. And PC compatibility out of the box, for you poor benighted PC-using souls
So, not quite an iPod killer, but should give Apple pause about the price of the pod.
Neither of these impressed me much. They're hideous next to an iPod.
Anyone know of a CompactFlash based MP3 player? CF type I is now coming in sizes up to 1GB, and could be used to make an absolutely TINY device. (never mind the power-hungry IBM Microdrives)
So where is the vorbis support in this wonder box?
comment directly in my journal
Look at the webpage(s): no mention of MP3, period.
Just because is's mentioned on MP3 newswire doesn't mean its not a SDMI earwig music player!
I'd love to be wrong about this, but look for yourself. Alas no mention of VogOrbis either...
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
USB *and* Firewire SUCK...
I want bluetooth. no wires, thank you..
Bluetooth not fast enough... ok, put in 802.11a
Recharge? make the back side solar and add a wind-up freewheel dynomo. screw fuelcells and chargers.
I want my tunes if the gird goes out and civilation goes down the tube.
not survivalist ready? fsck your product.
The only thing this POS has on the iPod is storage. In fact they should rebrand it as iPOS. To all you broke ass suckers who complain about the iPod's price, get a real job!
Why the Riot isn't cool:
The interface is clunky
Doesn't work seamlessly with iTunes
USB interface, see how long it takes to put 20gb on this turd
Can't be used as fast hard drive to store files
Size, I seriously doubt it's as small as the iPod
Battery life, I get well over 10 hours on my iPod, what does this thing get? My iPod can recharge right from my Mac, it doesn't even need to be plugged into the wall socket.
Appearance, the Riot is butt ugly and that's my opinion as a design professional
So everyone complains that the iPod is overpriced at $399 but this Rio product is "priced competitively" at $399? This just blows my mind.
Here's a picture of someone holding a RioRiot, for
2 _0 7.jpg
some sense of the size:
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/ces0
SonicBlue has joined ATI on my shitlist. My RioVolt, which is a great MP3 CD player, broke, and they WILL NOT honor the warranty. The don't even tell me they won't, but the e-mail address they tell you to use for technical support only responds with form letters, requests for RMA are ignored, and the customer support people, who you need to call 3 different numbers and wait on hold for 30 minutes to talk to, are unable to issue RMAs. What they do is they request RMA numbers, which are never issued. I've made multiple calls, and they are completely unable, or possibly unwilling, to honor my warranty. So I'll never buy their products again, and if I can convince somebody on /. to do the same, all the better.
Synergy is your friend
Choosing any AUDIO device shoule be based on one thing first and foremost: HOW DOES IT SOUND? EVERYTHING else is SECONDARY. Sure, it may have 20 megs, a cool interface, and might just have enough cool factor to show off to your friends. But if it sounds like AM radio, it's a piece of crap.
yeah but if you get a 30 or 40 gig drive in your neo player, you never have to refresh your contents.
You might want to check on how much the drive alone goes for in the iPod. I'm sure it will go down once demand increases, but right now I believe the bare drive is about $399...
So, what, you and two of your friends that actually use vorbis can play your music? Face it, Vorbis is a failure in the music compression market. It has not light fire one under anyone's butt yet. I am not about to re-encode my 400 CDs with Vorbis. MP3 does the job.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Still, they're using a laptop hard drive. The HD used by the iPod costs (to a normal end-user) about the same price as the iPod itself...
I guess they could have released an iPod at a cheaper price w/more storage, but then it'd be just as large as the other options out there.
Well, if their pictures are to scale looking at it and the headphones makes me think it is roughly the size of a paperback book, which makes sense if you look at all the crap they cram on the display. If it were iPod sized there would be about four lines of text (they rotated the display).
To me that makes it basically useless. I use the iPod when running, when waling the dog, and sometimes if I have to wait in line. If I'll be somewhere I can lug around that thing I may as well take my laptop which also has all my music, and some other diversions. Maybe other people will have some other focus for the device and like it better, but to me a portable music player should really be portable, not luggable.
The iPod also has a few other nice, but not killer features that this thing seems to lack.
Seriously though - do you all really have 20 gigs of MP3s??? I've been collecting for a few years now, mind you, not every MP3 in sight, and I DO have a job, so I buy CDs too. I've got a total of about a gig and a half of stuff that's of good quality, and worth (IMHO) keeping.
34 gigs of music? You've either got far too much time on your hands, no life, have never bought a CD - ever, and just download everything. That's wacky.
Find it here.
Apparently it's from the 2002 International CES. The page it's from is in Japanese, but has several other pics showing front/back/side.
Oh, here's one more, even closer up, from SuperSite.
Is nothing to be bragging about. All it is is low-bitrate mp3 with a horrible (something like 10kHZ) lowpass. The decoder then tries to *guess* at the high frequencies.
It's not much of a surprise that it really doesn't sound that good.
I'll wait for a good player with vorbis support.
--
grep "xercist"
For one, how many people are like you and have 34gb of music in MP3s? I might have that much if I copied all of my CDs to MP3s I suppose, but I never listen to them all....anyway.
Plus, he has not convinced everyone that firewire alone is worth the price premium... I think it is worth a little premium, as if you've ever used an iPod, music copying is almost instantaneous on a song-by-song basis, for my measly 1gb collection, it's extremely fast.
And lastly, again, the HD in the iPod is not a normal 2.5" HD. Go to apple and check out the tech specs. That is the main reason for the price, imho (even if Apple stuff does cost more on average).
Think about this for a second: the iPod has a ludicrous amount of memory (32M--as much as the *storage* space on the original Rio. Enough that you could whack it repeatedly on the ground with no skipping), it works as a portable hard drive, it has a general CPU (not just an mp3-decoding chip, upgradable firmware (meaning you ogg freaks ;) will probably be supported in the near future), and a screen that looks like it could do quite a bit more than text.
Now, you have this powerful, software-upgradeable machine with a good screen and a good interface. Is *anyone* else thinking that Apple might eventually release a "PDA" upgrade to this thing, once it's gotten a foothold among the MP3 crowd? I think that Jobs is positioning this to be much more than just an MP3 player, but rather an extensible part of his "digital hub". Even the name, iPod, has no musical connotations whatsoever.
Or maybe I'm just a conspiracy theorist... ;)
Rio products are fine (I've owned 2), but the difference besides the obvious advantages of firewire and small form factor is that the iPod is actually well constructed. Rio has a long history of cheaply made devices and it shows..no matter how flashy they are.
The Rio lines have always worked for me just fine, but the craftsmanship of the products themselves lends me to believe that it will be broken inside of a year of normal use.
bravo!
Their DJ functionality is vagly similar to my application Sondra that I made this last summer.
/ sondra/.
Visit the Sondra website at: http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/desktop/programs
Sondra can be downloaded and used right now without buying any hardware.
Sondra will create playlists based upon how good the song is (based upon ranking), # of times played, how new it is. i.e. the better a song is the more it will be played.
And anyone can go and re-compile it for windows if they want.
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Man, the size and weight difference is huge! The only way these devices would kill the iPod is if you dropped them on top of an iPod. And even then you'd have to drop the Rio from a very great height since the fringgin' iPod's are durable.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
This device actually has a 10GB hard drive (not 20), as mentioned in the RCA press release here:0 226-CI258,00.html
http://www.rca.com/content/viewdetail/1,2811,EI70
but here is basically an article that is the exact opposite... Rio Riot a Riot? heh!
If thats what you want, check the USB On the go extention to USB2.
I'd rather just take the (proven, existant, and nearly ubiquitous in the DV world) 1394 interface.
C-X C-S
Logic on crapdot? No way!
I've bought three RIO products in the past 6 months; A RIO receiver, a RIO car, and a RIO PSA play 120.
Support for these products ended within a month of purchase. No new software or bug fixes are availible for any of these products.
Will I buy another Sonic Blue product ever? No way!
-ted
How the hell does something whose math is off by over an order of magnitude get moderated up as insightful?
For one, how many people are like you and have 34gb of music in MP3s?
I'll be honest, my personal playlist is about 2500 songs, as a subset of the 9600+ I have total. (That's just the byproduct of buying hundreds of CDs as a dumb kid/teen, for two or three songs that I was willing to listen to.)
A 20gig portable like the Riot would be the perfect walkman-style device for me, since that would be more than my "preferred music" rotation. But trimming it down to 5 gigs would be a little hard, since I like a lot of variety.
My point here is, if my passenger wants more music (like an entire REM album as it appears on CD), he can just punch it up on myflatscreen PC in the car. That's why I put all 34 gigs there.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
> I don't need to put ALL of my MP3s on it...
I don't need to..
I can't !
20GiB is not enough - maybe 200GiB would do NOW,
but what about next month? I don't even have time to listen all new music - this thing would not solve that problem, because the new stuff wouldn't fit on it.
Still waiting for the killer 1TiB player that is as small as a MD player, is unbreakable and has batteries that last at least 48 hours...
..and costs $50, of course
you are a genius.
ps: you suck.
Joseph?
It is great that Apple has not lost its ability to slimily pull money from the sheeps' wallets. Great Job Apple! Any good tactician takes measure of the environment. Here, they know that the talking monkey, no critical thinking, emotionally reactive, herd mentality simpletons out there (self labled as 'geeks') will jump on this bandwagon because it is Apple. Which they erroneously see as an enemy to the technological Antichrist, Microsoft.
Isn't SonicBlue the company that has been causing problems with their patents on digital video recorders? I don't think it's good to support them.
34 gigs of music? You've either got far too much time on your hands, no life, have never bought a CD - ever, and just download everything.
:)
Not so.
I have legally (and probably blindly) purchased several hundred CDs and boxed sets featuring music that I enjoy over the past 13 years. (In fairness, MANY of these came used from the local CD Warehouse when I was working in a college town.) I have also legally purchased dozens and dozens of cassette tapes and vinyl records.
I spent about six weeks using my two main PCs to rip the CDs to my local hard drives at 128 kbps.
I then used file sharing networks (for over a year now) to collect all the music I had on cassette tape and vinyl. That *IS* fair use, right? I purchased the music, I should be able to listen to it in my home or in my car, right?
Yes, I have previewed music I do not own-- I won't lie. But if I like it enough to listen on a regular basis, I do pay The Cartel their due. (Sadly.)
I'm still waiting for the revolution where the majority of artists direct-market and end up making more money.
That's wacky.
Thanks!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I wish they would make one with an AM radio built-in as well, I've never seen an mp3 player with one...I think it would be nice to be able to listen to talk radio or music on the ride to/from work.
Winter 2010: With Glowing Hearts
The first portable jukebox that will funtion flawlessly under Linux using standard run of the mill: "insmod usb-storage".
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
As I can see, many ppl seem to have wrong info about rio riot... so here is some: - It fits palm of your hand - It has lithium ion battery for 10-12 hours of playback (charges 5 hours) - includes fm tuner - big screen (240x160) - every real reviewer who saw it so far said it was the easiest to manage, including ipod - ships with itunes & real jukebox... keep in mind, for ipod, you need to pay extra for Win software - it plays mp3 and wma, no copy protection (sonicblue is known for that anyway) - awesome headphones (for bundled hp) - every reviewer (Cnet, forbes, techtv) said it looked super sleek and was nicely designed overal USB only is a bit of a let down but people please, how many of you are going to upload 20 GB of mp3's every day?
Pjbox has had a 20Gb mp3 player out for over an year. Why wait for a new player to come, when others use one already?
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
What will it take to get them to support vorbis !?!?!?!
Actual demand.
Out of all the people out there who want to buy an MP3 player, perhaps 0.1% have actually heard of "Ogg Vorbis". Outside of the Slashdot community, I have not seen it mentioned once.
It's called an MP3 Player for a reason: people buy them to play MP3s. These profit-concious companies aren't going to start building in support for obscure formats just to appease a vocal extreme-minority.
Oh, and it would help if the bloody format weren't called "Ogg Vorbis". It's a name only a nerd could love.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
If you can afford a FireWire device, you can afford to upgrade your computer to deal with it.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - the famed star model for goatse.cx was found dead in his Christmas Island home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture and message board everywhere. Truly an American icon.
ppl have already posted about the tech specs of the IPod
The IPod is the IPod because of its design its form functioning simplicity, its looks great and it works, that's all you need that's all it dose that's what makes it so great
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
I don't like waiting all weekend to download my songs to an MP3 player. With a 20 GB hard drive it will take like 15 hours to transfer an entire HD worth. No iPod killer yet.
---gralem
iMovie is just a toy for home movies, Final Cut Pro 3 is the bomb for computer editing.
60 gig external FireWire drive is ok for storing DV, its cheap fast and easy to connect to the edit computer after the shoot.
Digital Cameras might be able to use USB2 better, but I still prefer those 3" CD Sony Mavica uses.
I just they would take pictures faster, drop into memory first, then write to disc.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Why PC's are years behind Macs amuses me everytime my neighbour says there are far more programs on a pc, I just hook up a FireWire CD Burner or a USB keyboard.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Their latest gadget is really neat: high speed transfers via USB2.0 (I'd prefer FireWire, but...), and it can do MP3 music quality recording and encoding right in the box. They are a bit bigger than the iPod, but so is the Rio probably.
20GB = 160Gb.
160Gb = 163840Mb.
163840Mb / 12Mb/sec = 13653 sec
13553 sec = 3.8 hours, or 3 hours 48 mins. Not too bad. Of course, it would have to be the ONLY thing on the USB bus. Firewire's overrated!
Personally, I'm waiting for one of these... MP3, WMA, Mpeg4 on a tiny 320x240 LCD Just the thing for the morning train commute.
Personally, in terms of money per storage space, I like my MPTrip clone.. I rarely ever listen to more than 11 hours of music at a time, and this thing works wonderfully. Despite the warning on the page, it actually does read CD-RW's, and when I have to change it, it takes about 9 minutes and I'm done. Best of all, this thing is er.. competitively priced, and it's a very high-quality first-gen mp3/cd player.
If you're willing to spend a bit more and don't mind not having Duren686's Personal Seal of Approval, you can try the AVC Soul Player. I've never used one, but I've heard nothing but good about it, and as an added bonus, the upgradeable firmware gives it the possibility of reading OGG files.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
The AC won't be modded up enough, so let me repeat.
>>20gb would likely take something like *two days*.
>That's FUD.
>It took me 11 hours to put all 34 gigs of my music on an external USB drive
Oh, so only 22 hours. My bad.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Mrs Palmer? and her 5 daughters?
:)
Fifth grade called, they want their joke back.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Translate from German
That approx. 13.3 cm for a long time, 9.5 cm broad and 3.2 cm high as well as approximately 290 gram weighing Rio Riot is delivered according to Sonicblues Onlineshop starting from at the end of of February for approximately 400, - US Dollar. Specification to the availability in Germany was not given yet.
see http://www.golem.de/0201/17653.html
Yeah, it looks big and heavy, it can probably destroy an iPod with one blow.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Aside from some incorrect math, this is actually quite redundant.
Most people that haven't used an iPod probably don't realize how great the "hot synch" feature of the iPod is- just plug in the firewire cable, iTunes is launched and your music is synched with the computer. If you regularly add songs ir whole albums to your mp3 collections, it's great not to have to hunt through the file system to find new addtions and drag them to your player. You can do it all manually on your iPod if you choose, but having this done automatically is great.
Gee, lets make an MP3 player with Dj functions. That way people will play illegal copies of songs in clubs with them.
Geez.
long live vinyl
I gotta agree... this thing looks cool, but it's no iPod killer. For one thing, the Riot is *huge*. The iPod is almost too big as it is, but at least it fits in a pocket, which makes is far more useful for many situations.
Plus, the iPod's spinning wheel interface is the best I've ever used in a portable electronics device. With other players, you need to click buttons repeatedly or hold them down (waiting for menu scrolling to accelerate). It can be irritating. With the iPod, it's quick and intuitive. This is the iPod's best characteristic, IMHO. Judging by the control layout of the Riot, navigation will not be as easy.
We also don't know if the Riot is as responsive as the iPod (which is instant on / instant play).
Lastly, while bbum was way off when he said it'd take 2 days to xfer 20gb, 5+ hours is not that great. Sure, you can let it run overnight, but the point is that with the iPod, you don't have too.
If I had to choose between the Riot and iPod, I'd take the iPod. For now, I'll stick with my $100, 192 MB, 3 oz., solid state player.
Let's lay this one to rest. Even refreshing my 32mb Rio takes too damn long.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
- Battery life. A hard drive contains moving parts that need to be spun, and that sucks up battery life. Laptops spin down their hard drives often to lengthen battery life. Thse players may do that as well, storing the current song in memory, but "spinning up" the drive to copy it to memory is still going to take a lot more out of the battery than a flash memory card. One AA battery lasts 30 hours in my Rio PMP300.
- Hard drives fail. I've seen plenty of desktop hard drives fail. I can't imagine the failure rate for drives that bounce around during your morning jog or your morning race to catch the train. My Rio has taken a lot of abuse over the last 3 years, and I've never had a problem.
If you want to carry 4,000 songs with you, it's great that you can do that, but are there companies still providing new options for people who aren't moonlighting DJs?It looks like the "iPod killer" has mysteriously disappeared from the writeup. Way to rewrite history, micheal!
Turns out I just didn't see it. Sorry!
Why is everyone so obsessed with beating Apple
the iPod is an Mac only appliance. Most people here don't have Mac's and there for can't use it.
If it's such a problem for you maybe you should just buy a Mac or a least try using one more up to date than OS 7.1
As far as firewire concerned, its only useful when you put your collection on the player for the first time. After that, most people will update their player with a few tracks at a time for which the speed of USB is surely enough.
With 20GB I could fit my entire MP3 collection on their 2 or 3 times. You could just start the transfer it up one night before you went to sleep and then it would be done in the morning. And then chances are you would never need to do a 4 hour transfer again for MONTHS if not years. Every few days you might want to spend 2 or 3 minutes transferring the new songs you downloaded, but most of the stuff on that MP3 Player Hard Drive is going to stay there for a long long time.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Isn't SonicBlue the company that has been producing interesting products with their patents on digital video recorders? I do think it's good to support them.
Two words: Mac fag.
Rio now uses Moodlogic to sort mp3s automagicaly into genres and moods ;) I think moodlogic is excelent ;) More users should try it..
t hr ead=52
http://forums.moodlogic.net/thread.jsp?forum=7&
It's probably because:
Way back when the typical slashdotter was still using windows, they made fun of Mac users, to make themselves feel technically superior. Most of this hostility toward Apple is just left over from that time.
And that there's a lack of understanding that Apple is in the business of selling Apple computers, and not supporting i386 Linux community.
See this page for a comparison chart of various hard drive based MP3 players...and why USB takes 15+ hours to transfer that much data.
Anyone that things USB can take on Firewire for this purpose has questionable tech skills.
I don't understand why there is such an unreasonable anti-Apple bias around here. First we have the story about the Shuttle where poster feels compelled to compare it to the iMac. "I find these little gems cuter than any iMac I've ever seen!" What kind of crap is that? Do you know what cute means? The shuttle case looks just like any other case, only smaller. It's not cute. It's not cool. It's just a small case that is just as ugly as a regular ATX case. At least the iMac and iMac2 had innovative designs. And they both would qualify as "cute" by most people's definition. The Shuttle is certainly not cute.
Then we have the "iPod killer" from Rio. Eh? The thing looks like it's the size of a brick, and I'm sure just as fun to carry around. And why is the Rio "priced competatively"? They used all cheaper components than the iPod, yet charge the same price? And that's competative? And the iPod is "overpriced" because it uses higer quality components for the same price? What the hell are you people smoking? The iPod uses a brand new high tech hard drive which lets the whole iPod be the size of just the hard drive in the Rio. The Rio is plastic, versus metal for the iPod (can you say more durable?) And what makes the reviewer think the interface is better than Apple's? Has dschuetz actually used either one? I doubt it.
Is it going to show up as a generic USB mass storage device? Or am I going to have to use some half-assed experimental driver to get it to work under Linux? I would say the chance of Linux support is low based upon the support they've given their other products. Sonic Blue might use Linux internally in their products, but have they provided Linux drivers for anything? Ever? Certainly not for their MP3 players. As far as I can tell, any MP3 player which doesn't show up as a generic mass storage device (like the iPod does) is nothing but a Window's centric RIAA-pandering product. I don't know why Slashdot editor would think that was cool. The only reason to not have an MP3 player act as a generic mass storage device is to keep the RIAA happy. And unless the company actually provides Linux drivers (which Sonic Blue does not) you are resigning yourself to half-assed buggy support. Bah.
Four times bigger than the iPod.
Million times slower.
Wow, this is sure an iPod "killer."
That sounds a questionable way of doing business, I'd report them to the Better Business Bureau if I were you.
I doubt that tiny Toshiba drive in the iPod can write 50MB/s.
Over two years old. I had mine in November 1999. No SDMI, lots of 3rd party software, and it works great.
:)
Problem tho? VERY expensive compared to what's coming out now.
I'll keep mine a while
Sheesh.
Has anyone bothered to actually go to a computer store and check out the pricing for PCI-slot IEEE-1394 interface cards? They're relatively inexpensive, and best of all drivers are available on the PC platform for Linux and Windows 9X variants (Windows XP supports it natively).
You want to have an IEEE-1394 interface for your computer anyway if you're doing any video editing work with video downloaded from a MiniDV format camcorder; a lot of professional-quality digital still cameras now sport IEEE-1394 interfaces also.
Anyway, most of the Compaq and HP computers you see sold at Best Buy, CompUSA, OfficeMax, Staples, and so on already sport an IEEE-1394 connector, so a portable MP3 player with a small hard drive that exclusively uses the IEEE-1394 interface is not as handicapped in the marketplace as many people think.
Yeah-- my math was off... but not by a huge amount. Neither USB or FireWire ever runs at the maximum transfer rate. Transfer rates to USB drives are fairly slow and I have heard [and occasionally experienced] numerous reports of extra hugely long transfer times.
So it is a day -- at best -- it is still a pain in the ass long amount of time.
I haven't been taking drags off the Jobs crack pipe. I recognize good design when I see it, touch it, use it and the iPod is that. The Riot is the fairly typical curvy-for-the-sake-of-curvy bloated hunk o' yucky plastic that'll be a pain in the ass to carry around. Yippee.
People get so hung up on tech specs that they ignore the most important for a portable device:
Size & Weight.
The SONICblue device looks like it is about 3times the size and weight of the appple product. Hardly something you can carry with you in your shirt pocket.
It can't; it 'feels' like about half that... about 200 mbit/sec or so.
Still a buttload faster than USB and fast enough to make it convenient to swap all content.
The iPod can play uncompressed AIFF and WAV files, and you can load 8-10 CD's worth of uncompressed music onto an iPod.
How long do you think it will take until someone comes out with a $30 fat cable that does the "arbitration"? It won't work as well as a system designed for it, but that hasn't kept lots of other poor technology from catching on.
Furthermore, transcoding MP3 into Vorbis is not hard. You could probably do it with a simple Perl script running in the background and not even notice it.
Please kill yourself.
There are plenty of alternatives. Get yourself a PC with PVR software, preferably free and open source. You'll get something that's more flexible and useful than a PVR to boot.
I had a Nomad Jukebox before buying my iPod, and I never got close to 1 megabyte per second over its USB connection. More like 300 kbytes per second, which turns your 5 hours into 15.
At any rate, this certainly isn't an iPod killer for me. If I was offered one of these devices in a even trade, I'd keep my iPod.
Math Correction...
Hmmm 12 bits in a byte? No, so actually we have 1.5 megabytes per second maximum transfer rate...
20 Gigabyte is acutally 20480 MB. Which gives us about 3.8 hours transfer at maximum rate.
Not that it really matters, you never get the whole thing transfered in under 5 or 6 hours anyway, but then again you would probably only do this once, and then add and remove music every now and then. The real problem with this thing is the size, not the USB port...
If i could work for 5 hours and make 2 days' worth of money, I'd be set for life.
Well, 20 gigs in "drive manufacturer" speak is really just 20 billion bytes, which isn't really 20 gigabytes, but it's what actually fits on the drive.
1 megabyte was used for purposes of generousity.
Could someone tell me the feasability of getting an ipod and using it with a PC. I know there is a new software package out called XPlay that should allow this.
Does anyone have experience with this package?
Sean
unfortunately, to do this you need to pay the license fee so that you can decode the mp3.
But, no one here cares.
Bastards.
comment directly in my journal
Firewire is nice but not the iPod's main selling point (for me).
What is, is that it fits in my shirt pocket, holds *enough* music to keep me interested, and has a battery that lasts all day and then some at work.
This Riot gizmo - notice how they don't tell you how much it weighs or place anything in the photo to give you a sense of scale?
Even though it would be nice to have more storage, I think I'll keep my iPod for now.
first off as many have said, iPod killer my ass, its not even innovative, there have been 20GB players on the market for over a year now. Big issue #1 though is whether this thing has SMDI or not, if I can't seemlessly move my MP3s around its worthless. No mention of how big it is, nor how much it weighs. From the looks of it its vastly inferior to the Archos line of players, and the iPod is even smaller or lighter.
As for this whole firewire vs usb, the issue is not the speed, its the fact that you can use firewire to power up the player. That's what makes me want an iPod over my Archos. However 20GB is way better then 5GB, as it stands I can only fit 20% of my cd collection on a 20GB drive, I want the whole collection on my player. Back to the powering up though, take anything but the iPod on the road and you either are spending a fortune on batteries or you are carrying some bulky ass charger with you. Not to mention the fact that the iPod has a better battery then just about anything out there...
Abstract Dynamics
See subject. The local computer store near me has a 4 port firewire PCI card for $9
Let me know when there's a Vorbis decoder for AIX, IRIX, Solaris, or any non-x86 platform, oh wait, there isn't.
no, not 12 bits in a byte. But the fastest usb ever really get sin real world situations is 1 megabbyte per second, and frequently it doesnt get that much.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
I have a pjb with a 40gb Hd .. it is large and heavy and maybe not every feasible(sp?) but I think it is cool.. you can run around the city with your ghettoblaster onyour back and when people ask what music you have you can say silly things like.. oh 20th century jazz all of ludwig van + a large selection of 90's hiphop and drum n' bass ^_^ plz don't flame me I am scared enough posting on /.
yes the usb connection does suck. but I only really find that I have to load my music once.. everything after the initial load, is really small loads but mostly editing/sorting the contents...
also I think that 40gb is to small I would like an ecessive(sp?) mp3 player. how about the osiris backpack with the speakers. + 4 WD12000BB(120gb) in firewire external cases. + a sony picture book to control everything + a huge battery.. sure this setup isn't practical or small
oh I know I should have provided links to everything but I am lazy
It's about time they started supporting this.
I converted some 128kbps to 96/mp3pro, and they sounded identical. Even if it isn't any better sounding, you could convert all of your exisiting mp3s and save some space.
Robort knows all.
Errr, I don't have the initiative to check and see if the device supports it, but USB 2.0 is 480 megabits per second. That's forty times faster than 12 megabits per second, which would let you fill the HD in 1/40 of 5 hours, or about 7 anda half minutes. And that's using your faulty math.
.
Give this thing a firewire interface and a better FM radio than I've got on my Rio Volt. And I'll buy it. USB is just to slow for this much music.
If you want to make a device work on Windows and Mac, just format the drive FAT32. Macs can read FAT16 & FAT32 drives, have for years. The Mac OS, since v8.5 I think (1998), has built in generic drivers for mounting USB and FireWire drives so as long as the manufacturer sticks to some common steps, there's no driver to write.
The only cost for two platforms is you have to write software which interfaces with MP3 software on both. But playlist formats are standard cross-platform and while iTunes is cool, the could opt to work with a cross-platform program like MusicMatch.
The posts above are from people who have an iPod and like it and people who do not have an iPod and do not like iPods. Is there anyone who has an iPod or has used one and does not like it?
I do not like Alaska.
OWC sells a leather carrying case for the iPod for $29.
Details are at http://eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search.cfm?Column =Description&Criteria=ipod
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
It's hard to tell from the photo, but I have it on good authority that the unit is approximately 2 feet by 6 feet. The display is very visible at that size, but it will be difficult to take it in the car or to the gym.
Why not, let me count the ways;
1. iPod is the size of a deck of cards, the Riot is bigger
2. iPod uses firewire, Riot uses usb. can you say slow
3.The iPod also acts as a portable hard drive
4. It doesnt auto synch with anything
5. Doesnt work with iTunes.
iPod killer, no f$#@ing way, its the same as every other mp3 player only with more storage space. Sorry Rio, please try again
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Saying this device is an iPod killer reminds me of the people driving souped-up Camero's who rattle on and on about how they "toasted that Porsche at the stop light" and feel that is an accomplishment. Dragstrip performance is important, well, at the track. You can't compare that to a well-rounded package and expect me not to laugh.
In this analogy, the iPod is a shiny, brand new 911. A wonderfully and carefully engineered piece of precision machinery. An art form.
The Rio product is heavy, clunky, and ugly. It really only beats the iPod in one area: capacity. So what? Would you rather fill an iPod with six gigs of music in five minutes, or fill the Rio with 20 gigs in five hours? Hmmmm.
The two products being compared cost the same . . . .
And to those who complain about the fact that not every PC has firewire: Anybody with a screwdriver and a spare 10 minutes can add firewire for about $30. Get over it.
I still have my Rio500 that I recieved for XMas 3 years ago, and it still works perfectly. If you're in the market for a Portable MP3 player, don't think twice about buying a Rio. Very well made.
let's go over why the iPod kicks all the competition's ass.
* fast as hell
* small as hell
* super easy to use
* super easy to use as an external drive to transfer files
let's go over why the competition sucks.
* the opposite of above
and...
* you need a fanny pack to carry them around.
hope this helps!
help out.
Archos has a 20GB mp3 player/recorder (analog and digital hardware mp3 encoding on the fly), it's only slightly larger than the iPod and uses USB2.0 (about 12MB/sec, not firewire but a vast improvement over USB1.0).
h tml
It's $369 and available Feb. 1
http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_500277.
http://www.archos.com/order_desk_na.html
-z
Pros: :-)
- 20 GB drive
- USB2 (i.e. Firewire speeds, but still backwards compatible with ubiquitous USB1 when you need it)
- Records
- 10 hour life
- Usable as portable harddrive; you can put non-MP3 files on there and get them off again (unlike iPod)
- Cheaper: US$369
Cons:
- 350g
Summary: :-)
It ain't as small & sexy as an iPod, but it's undoubtably more useful. ALL your music on tap (OK, a lot of it at least), a portable drive that plugs anywhere and is usably fast, and it records too
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
is to trade all my music to my friends, in exchange for all their musice. And I only want to take a couple of minutes doing this. And I want to be able to do this by just hooking up their mp3 player to my mp3 player and pressing the "sync both ways" button.
Nobody has mentioned the fact that the iPod recharges its battery via FireWire when you plug it into your computer. Is this even possible with USB? I know that USB delivers power, but is it sufficient to recharge this device's 10-hour battery within a reasonable time?
The iPod does come with a power adaptor, but you only need to worry about it if you're travelling, and don't have access to a FireWire-equipped PC.
The 90 day warranty is shameful. The Sonicblue tech support really is non-existant. The price is way too high. The device is too easy to drop...ooops! There went my investment. The whole world of portable music players is just so much crapola. Did I mention they are easy to STEAL? Oooops, there went my investment. Anyone buy a Rio 800? They suck in every way. I say Fuck Sonicblue, er Creative, er whatever.
Both the iPod and Rio Riot use Li-Ion batteries and have a life of about 10hours. As I see it this gives them very little advantage over MP3 CD players. A CD will hold more than ten hours of MP3's. A good MP3 CD-Player will run for 15hours on a pair of AA's, and you can easily carry more with you. I travel around a lot and that feature is very important to me. Until they produce one that runs on fuel cells (which can't be that far off) I don't see myself wanting a hard drive based music player. A CD based player may be larger but its lighter, less fragile and a hell of a lot cheaper. With the money you save you could even buy a solid state player to take running. The hard drive players may work while you're running but I bet it makes them fail a lot sooner than they would otherwise. One thing I have to say in Rio's favour is that their firmware support for the Rio Volt has been superb. I would not be surprised to see ogg and/or mp3pro support there soon.
The KILLER one IS the ARCHOS MULTIMEDIA JUKEBOX !
h tml
Check for yourself: http://www.archos.com/uk/products/product_550011.
I think the two important points are 1) form factor and 2) firewire. They neglect to mentioned form factor (so we assume it would be larger) and 2) it doesn't have firewire so misses out on some of the benefits of the iPod (recharging/faster transfers).
However, there are some good things here that Apple could use with iPod.
I'm sure there will be an updated iPod in the future (hopefully with Line Out/Microphone/FM Tuner/10 Gb+ Hdd) which will deal with this product (and hopefully a price reduction in the current model).
I like Sonic Blue's other products though (I think they are making more of an impact on the "digital lifestyle" than Apple). I hope Apple teams up with another company (like Pioneer) and extends their range to Home Entertainment devices (ala Tivo/Sonic Blue) and Car Stereos. The iPod would also then become a "transport" device for transfering songs between these devices and your PC; And Apple is better poised than Sonic Blue in the overall "Integration" of such devices. However, Apple best not snooze in releasing these things to the market!
The Treo 10, which has already gone here.
"Do something man. Right now."
Anyway, apart from commercial encoders, there are few options for good quality encoding, other than LAME.
And as far transcoding MP3 to vorbis, in general, it is not advisable to transcode at all, and a lot has been said about this in the vorbis dev forum.
"Do something man. Right now."
Has anyone considered that for some users, 5 gigs is too restrictive for a lot of the folks who like these kinds of devices?
I've currently got a 6 gig Nomad Jukebox - why would I downgrade my size when I'm constantly struggling to juggle which 110-odd albums to keep on my drive??
With my Jukebox, I switch maybe twenty albums a month. When it comes time to do a big switch, I have to sit down for a few hours, make sure my ID3 tags are in order, and then I send everything in a batch and go do something else for 10 minutes. Not exactly a huge deal.
I'd love FireWire type speed too, but the storage space and durability are far more important purchasing factors. Not to mention organizational capacity, something the reviewers always seem to gloss over. I'm really tired of using Dr. Tag at this point.
I must pay more just because I must buy WINBLOWS? HELL NO !!!!
Fuck it, it's useless for me.
I just found this from D-Link. It's a 10 Gb MP3 player, USB, 8 Hr battery life. It cost $225 and doubles as a USB hard disk. Sweet! That would be more my price point for a mobile device.
1 0/
The link to D-Link is here.
http://www.dlink.com/products/multimedia/dmphd6
More people have FireWire than USB2, right now.
Given that state of things, why would people switch? FireWire is technologically superior to USB2, faster, and has far more products available for it.
In the PC world, you need a recent micro to make either reasonably useful, so there's no legacy advantage to USB2 either. It's not like you can use USB2 devices on USB1. Sure, you can upgrade to a USB2 controller and keep all your USB1 devices, but you can do that if you plug in a FireWire card too.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Yeah, but does it play Vorbis files?
Nope, no sig
With all this hype over gigabyte-drive driven players, I'm happy with my Rio Volt SP250.
9 minutes to burn a CD of 650 meg worth of music (which is plenty for a week or so of driving); plus I have an instant backup of my mp3s.
And with CD-Rs going for as cheap as 5-6 cents a CD, I can have 20 gig worth in no time.
Plus the SP250 has the radio tuner, the rechargable batteries, and can be plugged into any stereo system.
On my budget, I'm really not worried about the gigabyte or stick driven mp3 players -- a few extra minutes versus $100 - $700 more spending is not really worth my time -- and not when I can expand my collection indefinitely via CD for much cheaper.
Sheesh, if you want it to be unbreakable you might as well ask for infinite storage capacity and a power source that lasts forever. Then it should also be pocket-sized and have a 27" screen.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Yeah-- my math was off... but not by a huge amount
Yeah, 5 hours, 48 hours; you were only an order of magnitude off. Doofus.
So it is a day -- at best --
No, as previous posters have illustrated, it's probably about 6 hours at best. Hyperbole is ill-suited to technical discussions and only serves to make you look the fool.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
sorry, someone gave the wrong info on the size, but the principle stands.
wait until the warrenty runs out, then get a bigger HD.
As for losers, you just go look in the mirror...
You are a big fat american who looks as stupid as you write.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
The teacher wants you to get off SlashDot and come back to class...
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
With an ugly face like his, he'd be doing the world a favor...
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Like you, I've been hunting for the elusive dimensions of the Rio Riot. Finally got it:
...
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/15760.html
"5.5-inch-long, 3.75-inch-wide, 1.25-inch-thick player..." -- that's larger (but very slightly thinner) than the Archos-bricko-player, Jukebox 6000. The article does not state it's weight, but I reckon it to be at least x1.5 that of the iPod.
Ugh, let's wait for something smaller