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Rio Reveals iPod Mini Slayer
Remik writes "Rio has released a limited edition of its new hard drive based player called Carbon. Coming in lighter and denser (3.2oz with 5 GB of storage) than the Ipod Mini with the same price tag $249, twice the battery life, and nearly the same dimensions. Rio has only made 500 players available in the initial offering, so get one while they last. There's more info at cNet, Pocket Lint and Gizmodo. Highlights: Drag and drop file transfer, charging over USB and Janus compliance."
Well, technically it does work with the iTunes store, so long as you convert the songs to MP3 files, using hymn and an AAC to MP3 converter. Yes, the quality will drop but oh-so-very-slightly. (People tend to really overestimate the quality loss when transcoding a single time. Do it like five or ten times though....)
As someone who just had his Rio Karma die a sad, hard-drive clicky death, I don't think I'll be buying another hard drive based music player from Rio until they decide to up the warranty.
.ogg files, which is why I got the Karma in the first place. But if they can't produce something which lasts, I say don't bother. What were they thinking, putting exposed moving parts on something people will be putting in backpacks and pockets?
I had 3 Karmas die on me: the first after a month (under warranty; the power button stopped working). Then the replacement died after 2 weeks because an exposed wheel got knocked out of place while it was in my bag. It took over a month to get the third one back from RMA, and that one just died from hard drive failure, out of warranty. Overall, Rio had my karma in RMA longer than I had a working unit.
I've got most of my music as
It's 500 for the limited edition Rio Carbon. The only difference between the limited edition and the regular version is a "collectors box", laser engraving, and a 3 month - 20 song pass on napster.r io/LE/
http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/email/
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
They claim OS X support, but then on their software page only have the firmware as an EXE... Guess Mac users never have to reflash their player?
This sig intentionally left justified.
Rio has consistently had poor hardware and hardware that consistently fails. I bought 5 rio devices for friends/family some time ago. None of them survived over 3 months and all the work to get new equipment wasn't worth the hassle. The mp3 players in specific just consistently continued to fail. After a good three tries everyone just gave up. Just to be sure I didn't get a bad batch a couple of people also said their rio devices died on them.
I don't care what they make, I won't be buying rio ever again. Obviously this is just an observation of my experiences and other third party heresay. However that's a total of a good 10 people. Enough to tell me that it's not just me. Most of them got ipods already and my brother just got one as well.
So i'm gonna just get myself an ipod and see how it fairs. I'd do the whole christmas buy an ipod thing but this time around i'll just think of something else.
actually, janus was the god of beginnings and endings. yes, he had two faces, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. his two faces was often used to symbolize dichotomies in roman social and political life; e.g., the Janus Gate symbolized both peace and war, peace when it was closed (which was quite rare prior to the Pax Romana under Augustus) and war when it was open.
interpreting janus as a symbol of duplicitly is a more modern cast of the roman god.
No, no, no, no, no! Maybe if you're deaf, stick with the crappy stock headphones and encode at 64Kbit/sec. but otherwise, you will definitely notice. Buy yourself some Shure E3C's/Ultimate Ears/Etymolics, or, if you don't want to spend that much, spend $40USD on a pair of Sony NUDE MDR-EX71SL Fontopia's, then encode your music at at least 196Kbit/sec. You'll be amazed how much better your music sounds than with, say, the rubbish Apple white earbuds. Now transcode them from AAC to MP3 and listen to how crap they sound. But anyway, back to transcoding:
Lossy encoding works by stripping out the sounds that the encoder thinks your ears won't hear, using fancy psychoacoustic techniques and other assorted magic mojo. You get 10:1 (or better) compression, and it'll sound pretty good because most of the 4th gen. encoders (Apple AAC, Nero AAC, Vorbis, WMA9, etc.) do a good job of guessing what you won't miss. HOWEVER, when you then transcode this to another lossy format the new codec'll try to do this *all over again*, except it won't have much source material to work with this time (well, 1/10th of what it had before) and as a result will mash the sound terribly.
To use a variation on the good old "baking a cake" analogy:You start with your "source", which is a fully baked crusty cake (your 44KHz 16bit CD).
You want to make it "lighter" but appear visually the same, so, to do it in a vaguely similar way to what an encoder would do: you pull the cake into many pieces or so, then hollow out the middle bits and stick the outer crust pieces back together with some similar coloured icing. Flip it back over and, to most everyone, it still looks fairly like a normal cake (this is your encoding to AAC or whatever).
Now you want to "transcode" it. This would now be the equivalent of smashing this hollow cake up again, trying to take away another 10th of it, then trying to reconstruct the original "shell". Good luck, but it's going to look (sound) rubbish
(Yes, that analogy is pretty crap, but hey!)