Rio Karma User Review

FuzzyBad-Mofo writes "On 8/24/2004, I took the plunge and bought a Rio Karma digital music player. My needs were simple: Decent storage capacity, Linux friendly, and Ogg Vorbis compatible. The Karma has a generous 20 GB capacity, decent battery life, is OS-agnostic, and plays a wide variety of file formats, including Ogg." Read on for the rest of FuzzyBad-Mofo's review.

Despite living in an urban area, I had a little trouble tracking down a retailer with the Karma in stock. Best Buy was sold out, but Circuit City had them (for full price, boo hiss). I was impressed with the solid feel of the device, and promptly started setting it up. Since I currently only have Linux machines at home, the included software was useless. Fortunately, the Karma also includes Ethernet connectivity through the docking cradle. In minutes the cradle was connected to my Linksys router and a static IP assigned using the Karma's joystick interface (not fun).

Once this was done, I connected via web browser to the Karma's IP address and was greeted with a nice splash page, and a couple of links to download the Java-based transfer software and to visit Rio's Karma page. I initially had trouble with the transfer software, but eventually found the developer's site on the internet; he has improved the software greatly from the version that ships with the Karma.

The docking cradle also has stereo line-level RCA ports, which is nice for integration with a home stereo. I ended up buying a 20' CAT-5 cable to give my Karma a permanent home next to the stereo. It's pretty wonderful to select 4 hours of random music for the evening, and not have to worry about changing CDs. Later, I also bought an RF adapter for use in the car, which works by broadcasting on an FM frequency you simply tune into.

The Karma is not bad to walk around with either. It is a little bulky, and I would prefer a narrower body, but it fits ok in a loose-fitting pants or jacket pocket. As with any hard-drive based player, jogging/running/biking with it is probably not a good idea.

Lockups: the Karma has taken a lot of flak for locking up, and I can't say that it's not justified. The player has locked once when I was loading music on it, in which case I simply reset with a bent paper clip and it was good to go. However, several days ago I was walking with it, attempted to change songs midstride, and it locked hard. Since I was on my way to work with no paperclip in sight (and the unit won't turn off when it locks up), the hard drive spun and seeked for 40 minutes until I got in the office. At that point, the unit was warm to the touch and had drained half the battery. After reset, the unit would not power up properly. Going into rescue mode showed that it was having trouble reading the disk. (crap!) After reading some message boards where others have experienced similar problems, I decided that I had little to lose and smacked it flat down on the desk. The Karma made a little grinding noise and booted up! It has worked perfectly since then, but I'm somewhat concerned about my purchase. Rio only offers a three-month warranty by default, so I would recommend going with an extended warranty if you decide to purchase a Karma.

Scary lockups aside, this has been a great little player. I believe it is Rio's first HDD-based player, and I'm looking forward to seeing future revisions of the Karma.

Thanks to FuzzyBad-MoFo for the review!

Comments

Does not inspire confidence

[erick99]

After reading the review I don't know that I want one of these. The reviewer discusses the negatives: size, lockups, ect. but does not really go into the upside of owning one of these.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

[lukewarmfusion]

I agree. If you want it to work as a stereo appliance mp3 server, that's one thing. But I wouldn't expect to take that with me as a portable. One or the other, maybe.

Portable player? Go with either a low-storage and inexpensive Creative USB player or a high-storage and expensive iPod. Anything in between fails to impress me.

MP3 server for your home stereo? Slap an 80GB drive into an old box with your favorite flavor of OS and remote connect. It's not that hard; my non-geek brother did this for his house (he's a college senior) and it's impressed the hell out of their party guests.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

[garcia]

MP3 server for your home stereo? Slap an 80GB drive into an old box with your favorite flavor of OS and remote connect. It's not that hard; my non-geek brother did this for his house (he's a college senior) and it's impressed the hell out of their party guests.

Or use an old laptop and a wireless card. Share the MP3s out from the network. That's what we did. I don't ever think that our party guests were "impressed" though. It was just part of being in college and having a friend that was a computer dork.

Portable player? Go with either a low-storage and inexpensive Creative USB player or a high-storage and expensive iPod. Anything in between fails to impress me.

Inexpensive/low storage = CD MP3 player. Cheap ($45 or less), portable, and no worries about a hard drive getting owned. It usually has more storage space than flash-based players and it's a lot easier to add more songs when the storage runs out.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Further, what are you going to hear from a lot of the people who complained about the iPod's battery being hard to replace? This:

"The hard drive doesn't lock up that often and, anyway, banging it against your desk to get it to work is just fine. Hasn't broken mine yet. See! And... and it plays ogg!"

Uh, yeah. Can you imagine advocating Linux if it were this crippled? "Every so often, eh-heh-heh, /proc disappears. But that's OK - all you need to do is `cat /dev/urandom > /proc' and it magically works again! Weird."

From the next-article-please dept.

[jargoone]

This is a terrible "review"! You paid full price (your own fault), and it was a pain to enter the IP address. Yeah, it has a dock. You had problems with the OS, but didn't mention any firmware upgrades that might help solve the problem. You did something stupid that could have broken it. Great.

What about the sound quality? Battery life? User interface? Build quality? Most importantly, given the audience: why would someone purchase this over an iPod? Those are the things we care about, not your anecdotal experience. This would be fine posted on a review site where more information is readily available, but it's certainly not destined for /.'s front page.

P.S.: First on-topic post?

Re:From the next-article-please dept.

[erick99]

I am surprised that he did not return it after having all of those problems and try something else. I can't imagine keeping something that locks up and continues to eat the batteries until you either jam a paper clip into it or slam it on a desk. I am amazed that someone would go through all of that and still want it!

Re:All that for only $299?

[winkydink]

Except of course, the iPod didn't meet his needs. It's right there in the first paragraph. Or did I miss something an Apple now has Linux support and support Ogg Vorbis?

Banged it on the desk?!?

[mreed911]

Going into rescue mode showed that it was having trouble reading the disk. (crap!) After reading some message boards where others have experienced similar problems, I decided that I had little to lose and smacked it flat down on the desk. The Karma made a little grinding noise and booted up!

This is probably the most telling sentence in the review. The firmware for this device is not capable of even a REBOOT when there's a hard drive error. NO recovery, NONE. The *only* recourse was a "smack it flat down on the desk," indicating that the firmware had quite obviously tried to get the hard drive to perform some physically impossible task... and banging the HD juggled the heads enough to produce either a good error or knock the firmware out of its loop and find the data it needs.

Firmware issues... yuck. Wonder if I can convince my web guys to drop their 1U server boxes on the floor when they're being slow to help jiggle those hard drives into compliance???

Archos is open source..

[freelunch]

I have had an Archos for about a year and have been very happy. The open source Rockbox software is great..

I don't see much point in the Karma. It is expensive.. somewhat unstable.. and like most proprietary products, will be End of Life'd soon enough.

What I would really like to have is WAV recording capability. Though the MP3 recording on the Archos has worked well and I have sourced at least one concert using it with the line-in and good mics.

Good recording capability is lacking in most products.

Whacks & the warranty

[greg1104]

Let me get this straight: the Rio Karma, a device whose warranty is a mere 90 days long, requires regular whacks in order to work? Wow, now that's a great combination--the quality is so bad the manufacturer won't even guarantee it will work six months from now, and you have to smack it around to make it even last that long.

The iPod is expensive and it is missing some features, but at least there's a reasonable confidence that a buyer will get at least a years worth of use out of it. The Rio may do gapless playback when it's new, but it seems owners can expect an extended and very quiet gap in its playback not too long after purchase.

Re:Not much confidence, but still a good player.

[rho]

Basically, you have to whack the unit hard enough that it turns itself off and restarts. Sure, it's unsettling and even embarassing if you have to sit there in a rush-hour subway train spanking a lump of plastic for ten minutes, but it works.

Jesus Christ on a popsicle stick... what part of "totally stupid" can you not discern from this scenario? Whacking your hardware is NOT, repeat NOT an acceptable option while troubleshooting. Apple tried this with the Apple III and (rightly) got reamed for it. Almost anybody between the ages of 25 and 35 still has active muscle memory for blowing on an NES 8-bit cart, slamming it into the console, and then whacking the side in order to play Mario Bros. That's not because the 8-bit NES was an aerobic device--that's because the device and the design was a piece of shit.

In case somebody is too slow to follow this, here's a Cochran-esque mnemonic--"If you have to hit, it's a piece of shit."

Slashdot reviews are a total joke. Any sane reviewer would have gotten to the lockup and dropped the review score by a third. When they discover it's a fairly widespread problem, they'd register riokarmasdirtysecret.com and drop the score to a third. When they found out about the generally accepted solution to the problem (donkey-punching a $250 device with a minature hard drive), the score drops to "Only Fools and Degenerates With Poor Genes Buy This". In fact, most reviewers would have turned the review into a grand joke, offering alternative uses for the piece of junk hardware that involve hockey sticks, slingshots or gay porn stars.

I have only two gripes personally with the unit:

Jesus Christ on a unicycle, I think "I occasionaly have to beat the shit out of it to keep it working" would top the fucking list. Instead, there's only "an unused jack" and "it's hard to shuffle songs" make the cut. Please don't breed, KTHXBYE.