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Hardware Review: Rio Central
I'll be frank- I was excited to see this box. A 40 gig drive makes this thing on the right side of the space curve since it means I can store a large enough portion of my CDs to make it useful. Of course as anyone who has designed or even used a large scale MP3 player knows, with great gobs of disk space comes the burden of attempting to create a UI to do manage great gobs of music.
What's the first thing you do with a 40 gig MP3 player? You plug it in and start ripping CDs. The unit is physically nice looking- it seems a bit big, but most of that is the large screen (which is unfortunately kind of dim). It has USB ports on the front and back. Optical audio connection is available but I tested it with standard RCAs plugged into the stereo in my office since I was familiar with the audio quality of this system having been listening to both CDs and MP3s for a long time here.
The box has a copy of a big chunk of CDDB on it, so it doesn't really need net access to rip a lot of CDs. However it does have a modem port, and an HPNA network connection for people using phone lines in their house as a sort of poor mans ethernet. I'm seeing a lot of consumer electronics with HPNA connections and it looks like a good compromise. Unfortunately the unit doesn't have a built in ethernet adapter, and it only supports a handful of USB ethernet adapters, so I had to order one in order to get this thing on my office network (to review the Rio Reciever which is a seperate device: review forthcoming).
Allright with all of that out of the way, it was time to rip a CD. The drive tray is white which is a minor nitpick, but it really is a sore thumb on the smooth looking black case. But hey, thats just my anal retentive side. Ripping CDs is trivially easy: stick it in and confirm the title. I ripped several discs without trouble (Gorillaz, Daft Punk, Ben Folds), but one had a problem (Blink 182's Dude Ranch). It just hung and there wasn't much I could do about it except eject.
Playback and navigation is a mixed bag. Doing common operations is pretty easy but constructing elaborate playlists is obviously going to be more work. Several nifty random options exist, like playing your most played tracks, or your least played tracks instead of going purely random. Very cool. I will say that this has the best UI of any stereo component MP3 player I've seen, but you need to get up close to do complicated stuff just to read the screen.
The audiotron allows a web interface. The ZapStation lets you use the TV to control playlists. Both devices have shortcomings, but at least there are ways to control your playlist without pulling your ass out of the recliner. The Rio's Remote and screen just don't cut it from more than 6-8 feet away.
The gee whiz stuff that is worth mentioning- having a hard drive in your stereo adds that plesant whirring sound. I'm sure that bugs people besides me. You probably won't notice it at a reasonable distance, but its there. The audio fidelity on the whole is as good as can be expected. We all know what MP3 encoding does to your tunes if you have a reasonable speakers. There are also silly little visualization things on the screen if you are into that. Its fun, but obviously its not the reason someone would buy this thing ;) But I know people who buy an EQ just to have the fancy lights in their stereo, so obviously some people dig it.
For those of you who are interested in getting under the hood, throwing in larger hard drives should be relatively easy. And with 100 gig drives at $200, you could really make this thing sing. If you plug a USB keyboard in, you can ease navigation in the UI... or hit ctrl-alt-delete, and suddenly the Rio Central's screen gives you an honest to god Linux Shell Prompt. There are a few games too, but thats just a nifty bonus, you won't be spending any quality time on them.
Getting audio onto the box through methods other than ripping CDs (or letting it read MP3s off a CDR) is tougher. The box has FTP, so getting MP3s onto the hard drive is easy... a little command line program to import a directory of MP3s would be swell. There's also an open source java application under development called jempeg which should eventually support the Central since it is based on the Empeg car player. That will Greatly ease the annoying process of getting your gigs of existing tracks onto the box.
There are a few other features that I didnt' really test. You can burn CDs or feed a few different MP3 portables. The UI to do this is pretty simple but I didn't have any CDRs or a portable MP3 player to test it out with.
Summary: Ethernet should be built in. Buying a $40 adapter for a $1500 unit is just silly considering the target audience for this thing. At $500-$750 the Rio Central would be a much easier recommendation. Maybe $500, and you add your own hard drive. But I know full well that such a thing currently isn't economically possible for a vendor. I still feel like the home MP3 player is over priced and can't imagine it catching on until it gets a bit closer to the price of big CD changer. But in terms of usability, this is the best one I've tested yet, and the standard 40G hard drive is probably enough for most people.
Coming Soon: the review of the Rio Reciever- this little baby connects over your network to the Rio Central and brings audio to any room you have an ethernet connection. This is what makes the Rio Central stand out. But you'll have to wait a few days to read about it here ;)
> but one had a problem (Blink 182's Dude Ranch).
there you go -
Because some people have $1500 but not the skills to assemble, configure, and install their own components, OS, and software?
Good thing it was reviewed on Slashdot then.
It hurts when I pee.
>Good thing it was reviewed on Slashdot then.
I'd suggest reading at -1 for a while and then coming back here to tell me that you honestly think more than 75% of Slashdot's readerbase has the skills to tie their own shoes or feed themselves, much less build a computer.
-l
I can feed my own shoes and tie myself!
Best Slashdot Co
See. The /. subscriptions do work. Taco has enough money to get married and still purchase a $1500 toy.
Does it play .mid files? You know how many months of .mid files fit inside 40GB?
.mid, .mod, .xm, and .s3m files, 2400 BPS upstream both ways...
Kids today, it's MP3 this, MP3 that. Back in my day, we downloaded
And we liked it!
And you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
What's the first thing you do with a 40 gig MP3 player?
:)
In Canada, you pay $840 extra.
WhatEVA
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform Perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland/Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks get it.
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by Andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchys power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy gets it.
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the churchs intellectual property.
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A.D. 150812 Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the Lameness Filter.
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
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A.D. 1688: In the so-called Glorious Revolution, King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy gets it.
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A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
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A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleons troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraphs use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally gets it.
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is bitchslapped. The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its freedom to innovate and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as Standa~1 and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linuxs stock drops over 200 dollars on Black Tuesday, October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
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A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream speech, which stated: I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek.
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: First moonwalk!!!
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for Internet theft.
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned hacker Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany gets it.
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa gets it.
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net.
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie Takedown.
(you're not the only one who is into cut and paste)