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Rio: [ RioVolt review | burning RioVolt firmware CDs | Rio PMP 300 review ]

RioVolt review

I use the 'Volt for Old Time Radio (OTR), so my review will be biased in that direction. I do play mp3 music audio about 10% of the time, and audio CDs maybe 1% of the time.

What ya get

The RioVolt is available at Amazon.com and at several other places, though you may encounter a brief backorder during the early days. I ordered mine from outpost.com and got it in about 2.5 weeks. It is well worth the money, and I've donated my MpTrip to my wife.

Media compatibility

Filesystem compatibility

Mishandling multisession discs

Here's what I tried: 

*Volt with 1.20 beta firmware,
*Disc A: open cd-r with three previous (non-firmware-related) sessions.
*Disc B: open cd-r with one previous (non-firmware-related) session.
*Disc C: open cd-r with only mp3s on it, used to put in the Volt
	to get it to say what the firmware version is.

1.  Burned a fourth session on Disc A with the 1.13 firmware on it.  Removed all
other files from the layout (ie, the firmware is now the only thing in the
root directory)

2.  flashed [down] to 1.13.  Put in Disc C and verified 1.13 firmware.

Note: Volt reported 7 files on Disc A (those from earlier sessions)
which it should not see.  This means it does not handle multisession
discs correctly.  See below.

3.  Burned a fifth session on Disc A with the 1.20beta firmware on it (overwrote
the 1.13 file of the same name).

4.  Flashed.  Put in Disc C, still showed 1.13.

The Volt does not appear to read the entire TOC when looking for firmware
update files.  It stops at the /first/ instance of the firmware it
finds in the root directory.  This may be related to why the Volt takes
longer times to read multisession discs than single session or DAO discs.
And is the reason I use a caveat like "Unless the Volt is doing something
unorthodox I don't know about yet."

5.  Closed Disc A.

6.  Flashed.  Still shows 1.13.  Discarded Disc A.

7.  Burned another volume onto Disc B with the firmware (ie didn't import
the previous session). Volt correctly finds the volume and upgrades
to 1.20.

8.  Added a third volume to Disc B, with only mp3 files on it. Volt does not 
see firmware, plays the MP3s.

Bottom line: if you are going to flash your Volt, do it with a CD-RW (if your firmware is recent enough) or write another volume to an old cd (even a coaster will work) and use that.

Praise

Nitpicks

Resources

$Id: riovolt.orb,v 1.5 2003/02/02 04:45:13 mouse Exp $

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