Rio300 for OTR

I got two Rio PM300s off eBay (sonicblue refurbs), one for me and one for the wife.

The Rio has 32MB internally, and can take up to 32MB of smartmedia add-on memory. The whole unit is about the size of thin pack of cigarettes.

I use the 300 for puttering around town; you can fit ~2.5 hours of OTR on the unit's default 32mb, and ~5 with the added 32mb. Because there is no resume, the unit would be better for short tracks rather than long ones. Audiobooks or 15 minute shows would be perfect; 30 minute ok and 60 minute shows not so good. Note that using smaller mp3s will allow you to pack your memory more efficiently anyhow.

the good

excellent sound
loud volume compared to the Volt. Really loud. Almost too loud, you've got to crank it down to the very lowest levels to get the low volumes necessary to go to sleep to.
small and lightweight, less likely to get dinged around.
skip-proof
expandable; the 32mb smartmedia are about $15 on ebay
plays bitrates between 16-256kbps or something like that. OTR is definitely covered.
battery life is quite good, probably 10 hrs on NiMH and 15 on alkaline. Writing to the memory cards seems to use more power than anything else.
Classical EQ mode increases treble to clarify some murky OTR.

the bad

runs on 1aa battery. This is not a real problem, but I prefer things that run off pairs of batts because it makes charging duties simpler. Now I use an electric airplane charger that can recharge single cells so that's not an issue for me anymore. Of course if you run alkalines (heretic!) you won't care about the single batt.
The rio software doesn't work on NT/2000/etc. Use RioShell or Dreaming of Brazil.
parallel port upload rather than USB. This doesn't bother me, since the memory is so limited anyhow. You can get about 170kb/s using the Dreaming of Brazil software. Note that it's about the speed of a 1x CD burn. :-/ USB will be much faster, but at some point the card burning will slow things down.
no flashable firmware
no resume. you learn to let it run and rewind instead of pausing and resuming as with the volt.
You can, however, use the A-B looping play to effectively pause the track indefinitely. At least until the batteries wear out. And since I use rechargeables I don't care about that part. Here's how it's done:
1. Do not use the Pause button; it will time out quickly and shut the player off.
2. while playing the mp3, press the A-B button twice. The A-B symbol will appear on the LCD. The player will stay like this until the battery dies (many hours, using regular NiMH in my experience). If you hit the button slowly you may catch some sound in the loop; if you do it fast it will be silent. I suspect the silent way uses less batt power since there's no audible output.
3. To resume, press A-B again and the show will continue.
You can also use tools like mp3splitter to break the files up into smaller chunks to make things easier. I crank it down to about 3-min chunks which means I'm never too far away from the old stopping point.
internal and external (built in v. smartmedia) memory spaces do not bond; they are separate. So you may have left over space on each card that is too small to be usable, but might be usable if the space was unified.
EQ has no audiobook/OTR or user-definable setting; normal or classical is ok.
pause powers down the unit after about 30 seconds. See the note on resume above.
there's no way to actually turn the unit off, other than taking out the battery. I don't know what kind of drain the unit has.
the battery door is prone to breakage (as was the case with my unit).
limited LCD just shows track numbers; no titles. There's not enough room...
physical impact (like dropping or smacking on a doorknob as you walk by) seems to cause a reset.

The Verdict

Get one if you can find it cheap; it's good for short runs and short clips. People who listen to music, short otr, and audiobooks may love it. Folks who need resume features may not be impressed. But hey, if you can get it for $20 then go for it!

$Id: rio300.orb,v 1.13 2004/01/25 20:10:06 mouse Exp $

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