MP3: Here, there, everywhere

The latest digital music players let you play MP3s on your home stereo, in your car or on the run -- but are they any good?

By Janelle Brown

Dec 14, 1999 | A year ago, the music world was rocked by the release of the Diamond Rio 300, the first widely distributed portable MP3 player to hit the consumer market. While it cost more than $200 for a mere 32 MB of storage, the Walkman-like Rio was a first-generation product that showed promise but lacked real practicality. Sure, you could download up to an hour of music and take it with you, but then you'd have to return to your computer to get more tunes.

This year, the Rio is just one of a flood of MP3 hardware products that have hit the market in the wake of the big MP3 hype. There are suddenly dozens of nearly identical MP3 devices on the market. I got my hands on as many as I could, looking for those that offer more features than a basic MP3 player. Many were limited in scope, but as a group the second generation of MP3 products is promising.

There are still many fundamental flaws with MP3 music -- one is the simple fact that high-quality music is a memory hog, making it difficult to store large amounts of music on a small portable device. Secondly, most MP3 music is stuck in the computer; whereas consumers want to listen to music wherever they want, whenever they want it. In the perfect digital future, thanks to a seamless integration of smart software, wireless interfaces and portable players, I should be able to listen to MP3s and Internet radio in my car, over my home stereo or while out jogging. Think of it: an infinite amount of digital music available online, streaming wirelessly to wherever you happen to be, on command.

Some of the players I looked at are experimenting with ways to get the music out of your tinny computer speakers and into your stereo or car radio; others are looking at ways to cram up to 80 hours of MP3 music into one little device. I tussled with my PC for two weeks and tested five new MP3 hardware products, to see just how close we are to a pervasive digital music future. The reality still looks a lot like a tangle of wires and glitchy USB connections, but if you squint real hard, you might be able to see the future too.

The standard

To start off, I took a look at the latest in portable MP3 players: the diminuitive RioPort Rio 500 ($269), an updated version of the original MP3 player. RioPort, which spun off of Diamond Multimedia earlier this year in order to focus exclusively on MP3 products, has given the Rio 500 a better interface, improved design and construction and, most significantly, 32 MB more memory so that you can store more music. With a new USB port, it's also much easier to use -- just plug the player into the USB port, install the RioPort MP3 organizational software and you're done.

Even the software has been improved to be more intuitive -- it took only three clicks and 20 minutes to "rip" (or encode) a CD into MP3, and a comparable amount of effort to upload that into the player itself. Unfortunately, the Rio 500's main flaw still pervades: because it uses Flash Memory, it can store only 64 MB of music (roughly an hour). If you want to carry more than one album with you at a time, you'll have to invest in more Flash Memory cards; at $60 a pop, this is not a cheap endeavor. Otherwise, plan to troop back to your computer every hour.

Next Page: A new kind of car radio

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