RipFlash DX Offers Music Format Choice

Why limit your portable music to MP3s? The newly released RipFlash DX from PoGo Products gives you a choice of formats for your digital tunes.

Billed as the world's first digital music player to offer encoding in the WMA format, the RipFlash DX will record audio from almost any possible source: your PC, your stereo, or even your own voice. The device converts the audio it captures to WMA format, and allows immediate playback without having to connect to a PC.

The $219 device weighs 1.9 ounces and is smaller than a deck of cards. It includes 128MB of internal memory, and an expansion slot for MMC or Secure Digital cards. The LCD screen displays the battery life, volume, and track time of the current audio file. It is scheduled to be available in mid-September through online channels and retail stores.

On the Record

The RipFlash DX is the latest in a line of digital audio recorders/players from PoGo Products, a company launched last year. In April, the company unveiled the Flipster, a portable entertainment device that it calls the world's first portable MP4 player. But its first product was the original RipFlash, a digital audio recorder similar to the new RipFlash DX. The key difference: the original RipFlash only converted audio files to the MP3 format.

"We see this as our niche market. There are plenty of MP3 players, but not many MP3 recorders," says Bob Fullerton, PoGo's director of product marketing. "The original RipFlash records to MP3s and plays back MP3s. The new RipFlash DX records to WMA, but plays back either WMA files or MP3 files."

The reason for adding WMA support is a simple one: space, Fullerton says.

"Flash memory is the most expensive part of these devices," he says. "WMA is more efficient. The RipFlash DX has 128MB of space, so with MP3 you can store about two hours, but with WMA you can store four hours of near-CD quality audio."

Getting Connected

The device comes with a USB cable for connecting to a PC, as well as direct encoding cable that connects to the "line out" or "headphones out" output on a stereo. It is designed to work with any form of analog output, whether that's a portable CD player or an old record player, Fullerton says.

When recording, the RipFlash DX is able to recognize the small silence between songs on an album, and uses that as a signal to begin recording the next song as a new audio file. That means you can record an entire album at once without having to worry that it will be stored as one huge WMA file.