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Posted by Julio
Franco on November 27, 2000
Company: Sonic
Blue/Diamond Product: Rio
500 MP3 player
Software
In
order to control the Rio 500, Diamond included the Rioport
Audio Manager (we used the 2.1 version that came in the
package), which will let you add or remove the MP3s from the
player.
After a
bit more than a month of usage, I’d say the Rioport software
is a mixed bag of cool and annoying features. The Rioport
Manager looks pretty good but that doesn’t mean that it’s
as simple as choosing the songs and uploading them.
The
Rioport Software was created with playlist kind of uploading
in mind, that means that ideally it should be used for
creating various playlists that contain enough music for
filling the memory completely, I’m saying that because
without doubt picking songs by hand and then uploading was a
real pain.
Once
you have all the songs on the database for selecting them,
there is no way of removing more than one at the same time,
certain Windows features such as double clicking for
properties or arranging songs by certain criteria is not
available. Although this kind of stuff might sound too basic,
it’s true that will get you annoyed everytime you want to
upload songs to the player.
Although
it’s clear the Rio is a MP3 player, usually we’ve been
able to transfer any kind of files to other players we have
tested, the idea is that you could transfer files from one
computer to the other using the memory on the device, sure,
it’s not what the player is meant to do but we’d have
found that useful anyway.
Also,
once you’ve uploaded the songs to the player you’re not
able to download them again, so MP3 file transferring isn’t
possible either.
There
are good things about the software though; it will let you rip
music directly from the CDs and also transcode the MP3s’ bit
rate in case you want to sacrifice the better quality of sound
for more free space and having more songs on the player.
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