Rio SonicBlue RIO RIOT DIGITAL AUDIO PLAYER 20GB SUPPORTS MP3/WMA W/FM TUNER (Sonic Blue-90260275)

Sonicblue RioRiot

SonicBlue RIO RIOT DIGITAL AUDIO PLAYER 20GB SUPPORTS MP3/WMA W/FM TUNER (Sonic Blue-90260275) Review, by Michael Gowan July 20, 2002

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• Reviewed by: tbutcher

  Strengths: Good navigation system. Great sound. Huge capacity. Nice form fitted case.

  Weaknesses: Battery is more like 6-8 hours per charge. Only bass and treble sound ajustments.

  Overall: I have really enjoyed this unit. While everyone seems to think that the included software is the only way to download to the the player. I have found that Windows Media Player works great. You just need to download and install the driver. I found it very useful for editing all the tags of my Mp3's. If you don't the menu in the player can get really busy. This player says it has an equalizer but all I have found is bass and treble I would have liked to see some pre-sets. But the sound is great. It did lock up on me once and I simply hit the reset and all is well. I have found the backlight system a bit of a pain. If it is turned off for day use (you cannot read the menu when lighted in the day)you need to go somewhere there is light to turn it on. That kind of defeats the purpose. I really like the Rio DJ features they are great. The included headphones sound good but are kind of loose. The other issue is the batteries. I would have liked to see removeable rechargables so I could change them when I was not able to plug in somewhwere. Terry

• Reviewed by: jayf150

  Strengths: Easy to use. Lots of space. Great value. Screen size is large. Buttons are easy to use.

  Weaknesses: Slow transfer rate using USP 1.0

  Overall: I read all the reviews on the Rio Riot and bought it anyway. Boy, am I glad I did. It has been a great player. I have many audio CD?s which I wanted to convert to MP3 format for downloading to my RIOT. I used MusicMatch 7.5 to convert my audio cd?s to MP3. Then I used RealPlayer 2.0 to copy them to my Riot. It worked out great. My computer is running Windows 2000, Pent. 3- 500. So far I have 950 songs which takes up 5 gig of disk space. I still have 15 gig available. I highly recommend this MP3 / FM radio player.

• Reviewed by: datzes

  Strengths: Interface, clarity

  Weaknesses: Backlight, Reliabliity, quality, USB 1.0, Software, Can't use as a hard drive

  Overall: I purchased the Rio Riot player recently after a friend told me how much he liked his. I had been comparing prices and found that the Riot was a great price for what it offered. So I decided to purchase it. Once it arrived I installed the software onto my Windows XP and then I found that the RealJukebox would crash on my computer about every 2 minutes. I could not get it to load the MP3 files (all legally purchased) onto the player because of these crashes. I called Real and found out that the bundled software is not supported with windows XP although the Rio Riot box says that it supports XP. After spending several hours reinstalling programs and talking to tech support I was finally able to get it to load some MP3's. Once I had the player setup I was starting to feel better, thinking how often am I going to have to load more files. It took forever using USB 1.0 and I knew that going in so I guess I can't complain. After using the player for the second day I was skipping around through tracks and the player just froze on me. So I did what anyone would do and tried to turn it off. It didn't turn off, so I just let it run out of batteries because it was almost out anyway. It finally turned off and I started to charge it and then went to turn it on and it would only come up as locked and I could not get it out of this position and the on and off button was still not working. I was very fustrated with it so I just returned it.

• Reviewed by: Trevence

  Strengths: Battery life, storage size.

  Weaknesses: Software interface required. File transfer limitations. Selective mp3 incompatibility. No file listing options.

  Overall: This is one of the most disappoiting players. You can't easily drag & drop files using Windows Explorer. Basically you can't use it as a storage device for other files (it doesn't assign a drive letter for the device... which it should). The software requirement is Real player jukebox. Although you can drop & drop files, it requires a learning curve to transfer the music files. It will not import certain mp3 files and the only way to correct the problem is to re-extract the music files from your CD (even this solution doesn't guarantee that you can import the files). It only allows one way file transfer (into the hardware player). So don't expect to use this device as a back-up. For the mp3 files that are successfully transfered, there is no option to relist the files alphabetically or group them by category. Basically, the order you transfer your file is the order you're stuck with (unless you delete all the files and manually re-transfer them). It's no wonder the market price dropped from $400 to $300 (still a rip off of a deal). What were the makers thinking?

• Reviewed by: davidrr

  Strengths: Memory size, ease of navigation, size of device

  Weaknesses: No edit function on device. No firewire connect.

  Overall: This is well worth the investment. I have had no problems or disappointments. Works flawlessly and has good sound reproduction. The battery life is as stated about 8-10 hours. An optional external battery (ie. dry cell) would have been nice to extend listening for a long flight. The lack of a firewire connect is not a big problem because once you download the songs, they generally do not have to be changed.