Rio Karma 20GB Reviewed

asv108 writes "The Rio Karma has been out on the market for over a month now with very little mainstream press. Slashdot covered the product announcement back in August for one of the first mainstream devices that supports OGG and FLAC playback. I've posted a little review of the 20 GB Rio Karma, which, besides OGG/FLAC/MP3/WMA playback, has a great little dock that syncs the player via ethernet. One little known gem is that this player comes with java-based software that allows users to download the software directly from the player via any browser and sync the Karma with Linux, Mac OS X, and any other OS that Java runs on."

Comments

OGG

[typobox43]

It's nice to see that some mainstream players are finally starting to add OGG support to their products. It's about time for a change.

Re:why no AAC?

[the_2nd_coming]

Noooo..AAC is the audio coded for MPEG 4.

just becasue Apple DRMs AAC does not mean that AAC is DRMed. hell, you can DRM an MP3 if you like, all you need to do is encript it which is what Apple does. you can DRM an OGG or a FLAC file too.

Made for right-handed people

[woogli]

It's obviously 'designed' for right-handed people. Interestingly, the iPod doesn't appear to favour one hand over the other.

Just a thought. -- and I'm not even left-handed. :) Granted, that's the larger majority of the population...

features I'm looking for

[David Jao]

Hey, I hope you don't mind me fishing for responses, but I have a few things I'd like to ask you about the Rio Karma. I have not seen these things discussed in any online reviews so far.

Does the Karma support dynamic playlist building? That is, can you program a playlist on the device while it is playing music?

Does the Karma support gapless playback? I've heard about the crossfade feature, but I'm much more interested in gapless transitions between tracks.

Does it display non-western charsets in the song titles? Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. Even accented ISO-8859-1 European characters would be a good start.

Finally, does it play vorbis files at all bitrates? libvorbis 1.0 can encode 48kbps up to about 320 kbps. I was quite disappointed that my neuros was unable to play anything below 64kbps. Some of Garf's demo files contain entire songs encoded in vorbis at as low as 4kbps. I have not heard of anyone who has tried to play these back on a portable.

Note that I am very close to getting a Karma anyway, even if the answers are all no... but if you could tell me that some of them are yes, then that would really seal the deal.

Re:my god.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The 90 day warranty is doubleplusungood. Sadly, that is the state of most consumer electronics. I'll pay more for a product good enough to merit a 1 year or more of standard warranty.

I'm not going to spend money on a service plan, I want the original company backing up this thing. I realize that is somewhat difficult in the age of rebadges but the principle still holds, IMO.

Had some ugly flaws

[SendBot]

I got one of these a month ago, and after trying so hard over a couple days to want to keep it, I had to take it back in exchange for an ipod.

After spending weeks deciding in the back of my mind, these are the features that sold me on the Karma:

Small size (although I decided the thickness made a huge difference)

Ogg support. This was a big factor in my decision.

Cool dock with ethernet

Nice display, 'analog' level dials were cool

And I found the following to be critical flaws:

Bugs! Too many inconveniences made it feel like it was rushed to market without sufficient QA. Songs would start over around 90 seconds into a track, or skip to another track altogether.

The management software (a java version is available to run on any platform) is crappy. No progress meters, lame compared to itunes or musicmatch or even windows explorer. This is the only way to transfer music or files.

Ethernet doesn't run at full duplex. WTF!?

Nothing esepcially useful about ethernet connectivity like a web server, ftp server, or smb. You might as well just hook it up over usb2 to avoid shitty transfer rates.

The physical controls on the device suck. It's awkward to use with one hand, especially if you wish to look at the screen and not your thumb/fingers. Some buttons are redundant, and it's not especiially clear at first how the scroll wheel will fuck up whatever you're listing to. It has separate volume buttons, but they're not exactly convenient.

It's physical presence is very... present. It's thicker in real life than I wanted to believe. It's also a little heavy. Ipod rules this comparison.

So, I just got an ipod instead. Same price and features, less annoyances, better support/accessories, iTunes isn't too bad. I like the 1394 better than usb2 for recharging it with the data cable. I'm sure there are a few other reasons to go with an ipod. I just figure it's no comparison with the karma, except that current lack of ogg support is kind of weak. I wish apple would pull their head out of their asses on this issue.

Short version. The Karma is crap unless it can get some major annoyances resolved.

Here's where to get some tunes for your new player

[MichaelCrawford]

You don't need to spend your hard-earned cash at the iTunes store, or get into trouble with the RIAA if you read:

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

It has been Google's #1 hit for the query legal music downloads for three months, and has had 14872 hits so far this month.

It has a Creative Commons license. You are encouraged to copy it.

A Romanian translation will be posted soon, kindly provided by Ciprian Mihet. I am actively seeking translations to other languages.

Here's the introduction:

You don't need to worry about getting sued by the Recording Industry Assocation of America or arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many independent and unsigned musicians offer downloads of their music in hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends The Divine Maggees, Oliver Brown and Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating copyright with the file sharing programs, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs directly from the artists and seeing their shows instead of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the labels have chosen for us to listen to. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads do not infringe copyright because the artists give you permission to download them.

Re:For all you tech hardware geeks...

[altman]

Actually, it uses a later generation CPU than the iPod (though both have dual ARM7TDMI cores), with many enhancements.

The iPod also runs multi-CPU... it just has less features :)