Diamond Rio Digital Player

Diamond Rio Digital Player Review

Diamond Rio Digital Player Feature

• Diamond Rio Digital Player

Welcome to the future of personal audio. The tiny Diamond Rio player plays MP3-encoded digital music, the open Internet standard that's shaking up the industry. It stores your music files in 32 MB of RAM instead of on CD or tape, so it has no moving parts and it can't skip.

About the size of a deck of cards, the Diamond Rio player weighs under three ounces and can store up to an hour's worth of music files encoded at 64 Kbps or half an hour's worth of files at 128 Kbps. The supplied Windows software and PC connector cable let you upload new selections, delete old ones, change the playback order, and even create new MP3 files from your own CDs.

What about sound quality? MP3 is a compression technique that discards a lot of the information captured by normal CD encoding. True audiophiles will hear the difference. But the overall effect is surprisingly clean, and the Diamond Rio's extreme portability more than makes up for the subtle degradation.

The Diamond Rio connects to your PC by a parallel-port adapter. In our tests, hardware setup consisted of nothing more than plugging the supplied parallel adapter into our PC's parallel port, attaching the connector cable, and dropping a single AA battery (supplied) into the Diamond Rio unit. The parallel adapter has a pass-through connector so that you can use the port for your printer or other parallel device.

Software installation under Windows 98 also went without a hitch. The default installation puts two applications on your system: the Rio Manager and the MusicMatch Jukebox. You use the Rio Manager to download new selections to the Rio player, delete selections from your lineup, or clear all memory so you can start with a fresh slate. It also lets you view the size of each selection, control the play order, and see how much RAM you have left for storing music. We downloaded a bunch of MP3 music files off the Web to the Windows desktop, dragged them into the Rio Manager, and clicked on Download. Approximately three minutes later, we had stored 30 minutes of digital music.

The supplied software lets you make MP3 files from your own CDs using your computer's CD-ROM drive. You can select 128 Kbps, 80 Kbps, or 64 Kbps encoding. The highest-quality 128 Kbps encoding is definitely worth using for music you really care about, but it creates files that are twice as big as those encoded at 64 Kbps. This means you'll be able to store only about 32 minutes of music at a time.

The Diamond Rio is a computer peripheral, and, as such, it's not quite as easy to install or use as a conventional portable audio gadget. But it delivers great sound, extreme portability, and access to the wealth of MP3 music on the Web. It's a trailblazing technology that's a pleasure to experience.

Pros:

• Compact, lightweight
• Won't skip
• Uses open MP3 Internet music format
• Allows you to create MP3 files from your own CDs
• Near-CD quality audio

Cons:

• Only 30 minutes of play at near-CD quality
• Requires a Windows 95/98 PC to use. Not compatible with Windows NT or Mac.

Taking the Rio to the Next Level! For the true MP3 fanatic, Diamond is proud to offer the Rio PMP300, the player that puts the Internet music into the palm of your hand. With a cool case and a whopping amount of onboard flash memory, it has all of the functionality you could wish for. Forget about the troubles or inconveniences; just enjoy MP3 music with the Rio PMP 300.