[vorbis] Rio Karma mini review

[Michiel Toneman]

Hi Ross, 

As an alternative you might consider the iRiver iHP-120. I'm listening
to Ogg Vorbis files on it right now. 

It acts as a standard USB 2.0 harddisk, which makes it VERY useful. As
it doesn't require any special software, this means it works great (and
will continue to do so) under any OS that supports USB mass storage. It
can use a database if you want, for which there is a little GPL piece of
software to generate it.

It is an amazing little player with a great feature-set and fine sound
quality. If you need any more info, just let me know. 

Ah, hardware support for Ogg Vorbis is now finally a reality :-D

Cheers,

Michiel 

<p>On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 14:32, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
> 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

-- 
Michiel Toneman <michiel at kopz.org>
-- 
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