Rio Audio, RIP: 1998 - 2005
posted August 26th 2005 10:00AM
It was a good seven years, but under the constant pressures of this mortal coil, our good friend Rio today succumbed
to moving on from this temporal plane. Since shipping the first mass-market (and second altogether) digital audio
player in 1998, the 32MB PMP300, Rio weathered storm after storm. After prevailing against the RIAA MP3 player
backlash, Rio parent brand S3 merged with Diamond Multimedia to form SONICblue, only to be cut up and sold to D&M
Holdings under the Digital Networks North America (DNNA) name, along with other withering SONICblue brands such as
ReplayTV and Escient; after a brief comeback with their relatively popular line of
Karma and
Carbon devices, D&M once again
cut up the business, selling Rio's IP (including software
and long-standing patents and patent applications) and engineering resources to chipset manufacturer SigmaTel. Today
D&M announced to no great fanfare that they would be shuttering Rio's doors permanently, though the Rio brand and
trademark will not change hands as of this time. Like the orphan child with the heart of gold neglected its whole life
until its premature and lonely death, we mourn the passing of Rio—loved so dearly but by so few.
[Thanks, Scott]
I had a Rio and now I have an iPod. Sure, the Rio had a few more features than the iPod, but it was so much more fragile and skipped so much more than my iPod does that all those features don't mean much.
My Rio's hard drive finally broke forever when it fell off a park bench, onto a relatively soft dirt bike trail, and that was with the power off. I have dropped my iPod from much higher (while standing) onto asphalt, while playing, (of course when the headphone cable pops out, it automatically pauses the unit,) on three separate occasions, and it is still working fine, even with one rather nasty dent in the back.
Hello
"2) Content management. If I find a bad/incomplete track on my Karma, I can just delete one of the tracks off the device right there. On my iPod, I have to write it down somewhere else or I'll forget."
An FYI, although not an elegant solution, I just create an on-the-go playlist of the crappy audio files. That way, once I reconnect to iTunes I not only know which files to delete from my iPod, but I will also have a list to use for verifying the original files as well.
cheers!
"My first mp3 player was a Rio and in the day it was great. But Apple eclipse Rio plain and simple."
How so?
"What no one but an iPod owner can understand is that it is the total package that makes the iPod superior to all comers."
Care to show me the total package?
"The iPod is physically easy to use and muscle memory lets one use it without even looking. The screen is easy to read and the software interface makes it easy to find the music you want."
You can use the touch interface to go through menus without looking at the screen? Good job, I was pretty sure that was impssible. AFAIK, my Karma beats the iPod in interface as well. As I sit here looking at my Karma, it can play music by... Artist (Entire Artist, Entire Album, or Track from Album), Album (Entire Album or Track from Album) Track (self-explanatory), Playlists (created, edited, and named on the Karma) Rio DJ (can play songs that you haven't listened to in a while, songs you listened to yesterday, a random mix lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to eight hours, etc...) Genre, and Year. All of these are broken up into 'Letters' that you scroll through to get to the [insert whatever you want to pick] quickly. And as I look at the songs I've got playing, I can see the song that was played before the one I'm listening to, as well as the four ones that are coming up next, all while easily being able to see the Track Name, Artist, and Album. When I click the scrollwheel in, I can play the song I've got selected (which can be anything on the now playing screen, with no limit on the number of tracks), I can insert Tracks, Artists, Albums, Years, and Genres with all of the previously listed options, I can move the songs in my list around, I can remove a specific track, that track's artist, or the track's album, and I can save and name a new Playlist.
"On-The-Go playlists let me create a new playlist if I decide I want something special and I can even create more than one and save them."
As I just explained, mine are better. Period.
"The iTunes software performs four important jobs seamlessly. Ripping my CDs is easy, searching for and buying music at the iTunes store is a breeze, orgnanizing my music is simple and I have a powerful set of tools to work with, and syncing to the iPod couldn't be easier."
Ripping my CDs through RMM is easy too, and I can play and rip them in Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WMA, and WAV. Buying music through there? Uhm, you can keep your lossy DRM'd music and pay for it too, thanks. Syncing my Karma couldn't come easier either! I drop it into the INCLUDED dock (with ethernet, RCA outs, DC in and a USB-mini jack), RMM opens and transfers my music. If the HDD is full, it will transfer off the things that I haven't listened to for the longest time and replace those tracks with new music... if I want it to.
"Finally, the iPod and iTunes store is available to both Mac and Windows users. Even better, the purchase rules are simple to understand and consistent. This cannot be said of Napster."
Really?! Windows and Mac?! My Karma works with anything that can run Java -- Windows, Linux, Mac, whatever. Boo-yah.
I don't know what you mean after the first sentence is done.
"Since the PlaysForSure world isn't controlled by a single entity the experience will never be as seamless as the iPod's. Case in point, when testing Napster I couldn't get the iRiver to authorize my tunes properly. Neither Napster nor the iRiver folks would take responsibility. In the end I cancelled my test and returned the iRiver for a refund."
News for you, friend -- iRiver and Rio aren't the same company.
"Does the rio still require MusicMatch Jukebox? I'd rather sand my eyeballs than use that POS..."
No, Rios don't need MM at all. Their final players, the Carbon series, are MSC and Janus compatible, actually.
"Are the people claiming you're "not supposed to" run with a hard drive-based player the same ones who call Rio a "real" company while Apple for some reason isn't?"
You didn't know that HDDs aren't made to be subjected to shock? What the HELL are you even doing on Engadget, let alone on the internet? BB's Geek Squad come and help you set it up?
I own a Rio Carbon 5 GB player and aside from the case, it is one of the best electronics I own. The sound quality is awesome and the menu structure is well developed. The UI is a little slow, or maybe I demand too much too soon. It is sad to see them go, damn apple players will probably go up another 30$.
I have had a Rio Nitrus for a few years and have never had a problem with it. I ran 5 miles with it 3 times a week for almost 2 years and it never locked up. Guess I'll snap up a Carbon before they are all gone. I love my Rio products.
Re: comment #39...
Did you say that you replaced your harddrive? If so, is it possible to upgrade the size? I just might be able to squeeze another year out of my beloved Karma.
Re: comment #39...
Did you say that you replaced your harddrive? If so, is it possible to upgrade the size? I just might be able to squeeze another year out of my beloved Karma.
Alright, first off I don't know if you folks realize this but with Smart Playlists you can (and I do) create playlists of your favorite favorite gems via last played and rating. You can even use it to exlude songs based on rating since some songs get forgotten for a reason. It's painfully obvious from reading these comments that Rio's products were not reliable on a large scale. Who cares if they have a couple features iPods lack if they break? You don't see many people crying over the loss of betamax these days do you?
An important thing to note as well. I know that every MP3 player has aped one or another of the iPod's innovations - its simplicity, its reliability, its interaction with software, its design, etc. But Apple was first with so many of these things and on top of that iTunes is hands down the best Mp3 player I have ever imagined. It's all a case of too little, too late as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather pay more for a product that Just Works™
Rio's QC has always been kind of crap, but their features were great. I've owned 3 Rio Forges, because of the above two situations. First Forge lost it's volume down control 1 month out. Second one lost it's formatting and I thought it was dead so I bought Forge #3 which promptly lost it's formatting 1 week out. Going to Rio's web page, I found how to get both #2, and Forge #3 functioning again. When I thought #3 was dead, I went looking for a non-Rio replacement and could not find the combination of features and expandable memory for as low a price as I could find a Forge for.
I wonder what my extended warrenty will buy me now?
The keypad looks like the one of the Treo 600.
Hey, Mr. Karmalicious, wow, what a fool we've all been. If only we'd known!
The fact is that 99% of all users wouldn't be able to figure out all the features you described if they took a 10-week class.
And half of the the rest of the people who COULD figure out don't care.
The fact is this: If a song is on my iPod, chances are, it's a song I like. Most people simply aren't that anal about EXACTLY how they want a smart playlist to work, and even if you are, chances are that the situations where I am walking somewhere (because having all those features when I am driving is pointless... all I need on the road is "play", "pause" and "skip") when suddenly I decide I HAVE to hear ONLY songs from the 80s that I haven't heard in the last 90 days that I have rated more than 3 stars BUT NOT including anything by the Ramones.
Most people put their library on "Shuffle" and go.
And that's why they're going to sell 7 million iPods this quarter.
Read this from the press release ( http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/company/press.asp?ID=611 )
Q:Will you continue to manufacture new Rio MP3 players?
A:Yes, we are continuing to manufacture products. However, Rio is re-working new product plans in the US as the transfer of technology assets impacts our current plans. As a result, we may change the direction for as yet unannounced products.
SO NO R.I.P
Aj,
Again, same as the above comment--look at the date. It's over.
I feel it my duty to stand up for Mr Karmalicious, as he knows what he's talking about and you don't, Alex:
"The fact is that 99% of all users wouldn't be able to figure out all the features you described if they took a 10-week class."
Amazing! I owned a Karma for a little over two days and figured all that. If by "99% of all users" you mean iPod users, then you're probably right
"And half of the the rest of the people who COULD figure out don't care."
Really? So people don't care about features anymore, just looks? Go on about your iLife and be an iSheep. I mean, they are white, after all.
As I sit here typing this listening to my Rio Sport S35s, which has been dropped 4 times, I can safely say that it is the best (and currently only) MP3 player that I have owned. It was dropped twice from a height of 3ft or more(Not intentionally) and twice flung from my pocket from my headphone wire getting caught on a cart. Guess what, it still plays great. FM Tuning is decent, too. The only bad part is the software that it came with. Not very user friendly, but workable. I still use it over Itunes, which had just started being supported for windows at the time I bought it. Sure, battery life was shortened when pulling songs onto it from the PC. A couple of rechargeable battery softened that. All's good.
So let us not come here to bury Ceas...Uh, Rio, but to praise it for what it had accompliced. Being one of the first to market (with decent quality, no less) as well as being the first under fire for such doing so at the time. It persevered like the little engine that tried. So, as I ponder my next MP3 player purchase (maybe the Sony NW-E07)should this, my S35s, should die 1000 deaths and being serenaded by Jazz styings being lovingly carried by my trusty stead, I say,"Alas, poor Rio, I knew ye well"
Brave, brave Concorde, you shall not have died in vain!
Thanks Lyco... enjoying your DSL? ;)
"Re: comment #39...
Did you say that you replaced your harddrive? If so, is it possible to upgrade the size? I just might be able to squeeze another year out of my beloved Karma."
Yep, it sure is possible. 20, 30, 40, and 60 giggers are available. The 40 and 60 gig ones require a little bit of case-dremmeling, but nothing hard. Good luck, man!
I think what Alex was saying was that the features that you guys are touting are obviously not features the marketplace demanded. Apple's genius in all things is isolating what things are important to a user and what things aren't. That way the user is able to quickly navigate and comprehend what they do need faster. It's not that people don't care about features, it's that manufacturers create a lot of features with little or no demand behind hem. How much better was the very last Walkman you bought than the first one you bought?
Well, that's Sony for you, Brian.
Of course people don't care about parametric EQ and gapless -- the only player that they know of, the iPod, has neither. If people knew what those things /were/, they'd want them. Unless they're stupid... who the hell wouldn't want to have their music play back CORRECTLY or be able to adjust the sound to their liking? Who wouldn't want to be able to see the upcoming tracks in the playlist? Who wouldn't want to have a player that works on most OSs? WHo wouldn't want a headphone amp that's twice as powerful? Who wouldn't want a player that they can move through quickly and easily (the Karma is just as easy to get around in as the iPod, except that they didn't dumb the shit out of it)?
Who wouldn't? Would you?
Now that Rio is dead, hopefully this is the last time we have to go through these circular arguments!
I run with my HD based Rio Nitrus all the time and have never had a problem. 'Course, it does say "for home or office use" on the back. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones.
Are you people seriously debating this "running with a HDD player" thing? ...So much for all the marketed armbands for the HDD iPods...
All I have to say is.. another one bites the dust. Maybe with a big-name-brand-crappy-mp3-player company pushing up daisies, all of the no-name ones will follow suit.
Sometimes companies actually do come out with a better product.. deal with it. The world does not revolve around us techno-geeks and our desires for better, stronger, faster. A product is not solely judged, developed, and therefore marketed for functionality or an excess thereof. Products that are developed on only one front usually have short runs, we may drool and revel in their existance and capabilities but we shouldn't expect the rest of the world to react in the same way. Our only recourse is to erect shrines on the internet so that the rest of our kind can pilgramize and pay homage.
..well that was a tangent...
The best feature about the Karma is the Ogg Vorbis support. In the same vein, the lack of options for the ipod is its most glaring weakness. I have the 20GB karma, filled with OGG files, while my brother uses a 40GB Ipod, and I can fit more files on my 20GB karma, just because OGG is so much smaller than mp3 and AAC. Long live OGG VORBIS! (they sound much better also).
unfortunately, Ipod users win because every company in the world is trying to market accessories toward them. Finding things like fm modulators is easy for an ipod owner, and the products are actually designed with the ipod in mind, so they fit properly, etc. Good luck finding a well-functioning modulator for the karma.
it's too bad that the masses are not smart enough to understand the basics of these technologies, because if they understood some of these things, apple would never be able to succeed so wildly with such limited file formats.
also, my karma cost me $150, while my brother's ipod cost him 400. but i guess the extra loot was well-spent because he can be ultra trendy with his white earbuds that sound like crap.
Well, Mr. Karmalicious I'll give you my answers.
Cross-fading: I turned this feature off in iTunes because since it is an automated feature it more frequently causes trainwrecks than it does good transitions
EQ: I only need this when in my car, and it has its own EQ, and on a couple songs with the bass too high in the mix, which I can pre-EQ in iTunes and my iPod applies this setting to them.
Headphone amp: Have you lost all your hearing? Do you actually need anything louder than an iPod? If you do, you should seriously consider taking a hearing test. You shouldn't even be listening to anything at the iPod's full volume for more than a song's length or you will damage your hearing with each use.
Working on most OSes: This is a joke, right? The iPod was either the first or one of the first MP3 players to support the MacOS, and now natively supports Windows. My roomate uses his iPod with his Linux box and has no problems. What OSes are you referring to here? OS/2? How many non-iPod MP3 players work on MacOS? Definitely not all of them.
Being able to see the next songs in your playlist: Alright, you've got me here, that would be nice at times. But not worth sacrificing the things I like about my iPod or being the basis for my choice of MP3 player.
The bottom line is these are small features that appeal to a small set of the MP3 player purchasers. And they say nothing of the advantages that an iPod surely has over whichever product you're trying to pitch it against, such as the fact that it has vastly more third-party products supporting it, not to mention BMW and Scion supporting it directly in cars, if I recall. And that's just one small thing off the top of my head.
Has anybody mentioned the Rio Karma's support of OGG/FLAC? It's the reason why, when I won an iPod at a company raffle last Christmas, I took the iPod back to Circuit City and got a Rio Karma instead. Since then, I've taken the player all the way to the Himalyas in India and back with no problems at all. And the fact that you can plug the Karma into its cradle and it becomes a device on your network with an IP address via DHCP.
Apple might be ahead on form factor, but the Karma crushed them on file formats and functionality.
I'm waiting for my Karma which should arrive in a few days. It's the only player I've been able to find (in the Netherlands) that supports Ogg Vorbis aswell as FLAC. I guess I was lucky, because I found just one(1) online shop that still has some Karma's in stock (amazon.com|co.uk|de all sold out). That was the most important reason for me. I hate doing flac2mp3 just because some crappy player don't like the format. Also, while gapless playback/crossfading might not be a huge plus for the masses, it sure is for me :). Let alone the fact that my audio player (okay, fair enough, it's dock) has an ethernet connection :D
Sorry, one more thing, the URL of the webshop:
http://www.pixmania.nl/nl/nl/80867/art/rio/mp3-speler-karma-labtec-2.html
BTW, that's a Dutch site, if you hadn't figured that one out already ;)
It sounds like people are talking about two distinct things: The better player AND the better seller.
These two items are being jumbled together. I don't think too many of us Karma owners would dispute the iPod's sales numbers or its accessibility to a wider range of average users. It is sour grapes to whine about Apple trouncing Rio, et al, in the market, since they simply out-marketed the competition.
However, I consider it equally ridiculous to try comparing iPod to Karma in functionality. You have to do some serious tweaking and lying to yourself in order to somehow land the iPod on even the same playing field as the Karma. In features, sound quality and functionality, the iPod couldn't carry the Karma's arm-strap.
I have both an Apple iPod photo, and a Rio CE2100 (like the Carbon except 2.5G instead of
5 GB storage capacity). I always liked the build quality and asthetics of the Rio Carbon. The best part, however is that I picked up the
CE2100 for $74.95 at Target. That's cheaper than the money I paid for a 1G SD flash card.
It is unfortunate that Rio is discontinuing its audio player product line.
Help. Does anyone know how to rip music off of the Rio Riot? Are there any plugins that will do the trick?