[vorbis] Rio Karma mini review

[Ross Vandegrift]

Hello everyone,

        Stopped by Best Buy last night and picked up a Rio Karma.  Since
from-the-trenches reviews seem scarce, I thought I might post some
thoughts.

        The short story: I'm probably returning it, will be buying a
different portable player.  The software doesn't work, and I don't think
I wanna screw with it.

        The long story: It looks cool, is tiny, convenient, sounds
pretty good, and has a cool docking station.  It claims to have software
for GNU/Linux (well, any platform with Java capabilities).  It has some
neat features - 10/100 Ethernet and a RioDJ that generates playlists on
the fly for you (Most/least listened to songs, Sounds of a decade,
Favorites, random, etc).

        I connected it to my home network, and its DHCP was unable to
get an IP address.  This looks like it might be a problem with the last
port on my switch - I'm not sure.  I did eventually get it networking.

        Downloaded the latest Rio Music Manager Lite Java program and
loaded it up with a fresh JRE 1.4.2 installation.  Nothing worked.  It
could connect to the Rio, but uploading songs was a total failure - got
a bunch of JVM errors.  Tried MP3s and Oggs, no dice either way.

        Since the RMML software isn't free, I couldn't fix it myself.  So,
a music player that doesn't accept downloads is pretty useless!  I've
heard the wire protocol is pretty easy to reverse engineer.  If I had
the time to do this I actually might - there are enough cool features to
definitely make it worth someone's time.  But as it stands now, it's a
pretty lost cause if you just want it to work.

Ross


-- 
Ross Vandegrift
ross at willow.seitz.com

A Pope has a Water Cannon.                               It is a Water Cannon.
He fires Holy-Water from it.                        It is a Holy-Water Cannon.
He Blesses it.                                 It is a Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He Blesses the Hell out of it.          It is a Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He has it pierced.                It is a Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
He makes it official.       It is a Canon Holey Wholly Holy Holy-Water Cannon.
Batman and Robin arrive.                                       He shoots them.
--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.