Is Rio grand?

With the new MP3 player, the future of online music distribution is here now -- it's just a bit slow.

By Janelle Brown

Dec 9, 1998 | Call it the "I get it" moment -- that epiphany when you witness a new technology in action for the first time, and suddenly the musings of sci-fi writers, visionaries and techno-pundits make sense. For years we've read that someday we'd be receiving all of our music digitally and instantly off the Internet. But it wasn't until I started playing with the new RioPMP300 MP3 player, from Diamond Multimedia, that this vision began to seem tangible and meaningful.

Like most first-generation technologies, the Rio is still more vision than function: The future possibilities are more impressive than what can currently be done with the product. The Rio is certainly cool -- every geek I showed mine to gushed at the prospect of fooling around with it -- but it's going to need a lot of enhancements before it becomes truly practical.

The $200 Rio is a snazzy-looking little portable music player, less than half the size of a Walkman, that stores and plays songs in the MP3 format -- a compression standard favored on the Net for storing and sharing sound files. The Rio will hold up to about an hour of music in its 32 megabytes of flash memory -- music you can either download from the Net orencode from your own CDs. The music quality is that of MPEG layer 3 -- that is to say, crisp, clear, nearly CD-quality sound. One battery will power the player for up to 12 hours.

The Rio incorporates many of the basic functions of a CD player -- it allows you to scroll through songs, randomly play tracks, use different equalization (or tone) settings and repeat tracks. There's a looping function for musicians who want to examine certain passages. And best of all, since the Rio uses no moving parts, the music will never skip no matter how much you throw it around. The functions are designed so intuitively, in fact, that your average 7-year-old could figure out how to play the thing.

Actually getting the music into the Rio, however, is a different story.

The device connects to your PC via the parallel printer port (sorry, Mac owners, there's no Rio for you) and comes with a CD-ROM of Rio software. To upload music from your PC to the Rio, you simply drag and drop the tracks you want to hear onto a playlist, and the software automatically moves the music for you. To remove a song, click on the title and hit delete.

But that's the simple part -- the problem starts with getting the music onto your PC in the first place. The Rio plays only MP3, which means you have to obtain music in that format, either by downloading MP3 tracks off the Web or "ripping" your own CDs (taking tracks from your music CD collection and encoding them in MP3 format).

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