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Downloading From the RIO

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the RIAA-is-gonna-hate-this dept.

Trey writes "MP3 Place reported this. Previously you could ONLY upload files to the Rio, and you could only upload Mp3 files. With the Riogeo program, you can now upload and download any file format, With this, you'll have a 32 MB portable drive! Currently it is a simple DOS command line prog." What about a Linux port? More importantly, what is the RIAA gonna think about this? Maybe the next Rio (or comparable product) will have sync capabilities like a pilot- just connect with your friends and trade tunes? Oh dear, this industry is going to get crazy real fast.

2 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Audio Home Recording Act by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2
    A few interesting articles from www.minidisc.org
    • An e-mail from the RIAA stating why it allows CD to Minidisc copies and not CD to hard-drive/MP3 copies. (They collect money from the Minidisc manufacturers to offset potential illegal copying!)

    • The last paragraph of this article shows how perverse the whole situation is:

      The issue here is not really one of tape piracy. If the music industry really wants to stop its CDs from being copied digitally, it can easily put "flags" in the digital signal that would prohibit all copying. However, a 1989 study by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment found that about one-quarter of all pre-recorded music purchases were made after the consumer heard the artist or recording on a home-made (pirated) tape. It turns out that a little piracy, if it's not overdone, is good for the music business.

    • this is also confirmed in this interview with Geffen's director of technology:

      Easton: So you're saying that we're better off, that a record company may be better off with people out there pirating audio off the 'Net because that could conceivably increase your sales . . .

      Griffin: Yes . . .

  2. Nothing new... but check out these ideas. by Kaz+Kylheku · · Score: 2

    There is already a Linux program that can do this; and the URL was already posted to Slashdot some time ago. What's more, the program is open-source.

    It turns out that the Rio is in fact a random-access block device with a block size of 32K.

    I'm thinking of writing a Linux block device driver that will treat the Rio as yet another hard drive, so you could mount your ext2fs on it. Also, a filesystem module ``riofs'' that would let you mount the RIO file system. This way you could just use good old ``mount'', ``unmount'', ``cp'' and ``rm'' to manage the MP3's in the Rio rather than using some specialized command line program. And of course whatever GUI file manager you may currently use should also be compatible. In other words, the integration of Rio into Linux would be a heck of a lot better. Also the problem of having to run a suid root program would go away.

    What do you slashdotters think?