Rio Riot and Lyra Personal Jukebox

dschuetz writes: "SONICblue has the new Rio Riot up on their home page. It looks to me like an iPod killer -- 20 GB hard drive, very nice interface (better than Apple's), built-in FM tuner, powerful "DJ" functions, Lithium Ion batteries. And, at $399, it's priced competitively. The only question is -- how big is this thing? SONICblue has lots of other great systems out there, like the ReplayTV and Rio Receiver (which runs Linux), so the possibilities for hacking and otherwise extending this device are very good." Another submitter sends: "MP3 Newswire has a story on the RCA LYRA Personal Jukebox, a 20GB MP3/mp3PRO player that is the first portable to use the updated digital music compression scheme co-developed by its parent company Thompson. The new Lyra sells for $299. In related news, SonicBlue has released its first jukebox style player, also a 20GB unit called the Rio Riot that sells for $399. Both articles have pictures of the new players."

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

One quick search on Google will tell you that you can use the iPod on Win98/2000/XP . . .

Download the trial here [mediafour.com].

Remember: PC Software for iPod!

[rbruels]

Everyone says the iPod is only Mac-compatible... you need XPlay [mediafour.com] by MediaFour. Then you can use your iPod on a PC -- under Windows, anyhow. No Linux support yet, but I know some enterprising programmer will release software soon.

MediaFour had a demo of XPlay at MacWorld, running on XP, and I have to admit it was pretty sexy.

Re:Still USB

[Jeffrey Baker]

USB2 is pretty pointless for non-computer devices. IEEE1394 devices can talk to each other, point-to-point. For example, you can have a 1394 camera interfacing directly with a 1394 editing console which in turn interfaces with a 1394 VTR. USB and USB2 devices require a computer to run the show. Thus you would plug your USB2 camera, if there will be such a thing, into your computer and your VTR into your computer, and use them. If you don't have a computer arbitrating USB traffic, the USB devices are useless.

Two DAYS? what crack are you smoking?

[Wakko Warner]

Let's see. USB is 12 megabits per second. Let's say that's 1 megabyte per second.

Now, 20 gigabytes is 20,000 megabytes. So it'd take 20,000 seconds to fill the hard drive in the Riot. How long is 20,000 seconds? Well, let's do some math here.

There are 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour. That makes 3600 seconds in an hour. 3600 goes into 20,000 roughly 5 times.

So it'd take about 5 HOURS to fill the thing, not TWO DAYS! Let's get our math straight first before we make declarative statements about the product.

- A.P.

Re:Still USB

[eggz128]

If thats what you want, check the USB On the go [usb.org] extention to USB2.

Re:Still USB

[mr100percent]

What if I wanted to boot off the drive? you can do this with them. The firewire lets you boot exrtremely quickly, almost as fast as the Internal HD.

But the USB will take at least 10 minutes before you can do anything useful, and it'll be as slow or slower than 10BaseT ethernet.

Re:make it play vorbis

[Jeffrey Baker]

The problem is that these portable players all use ASIC MP3 decoders. They do the job accurately and without drawing much power. There are no existing Ogg Vorbis ASIC decoders, so you would need to do it in software with a relatively beefy CPU, which in turn means significantly reduced battery life.

Here's an image with some scale

[mike_lynn]

Find it here [impress.co.jp].
Apparently it's from the 2002 International CES. The page [impress.co.jp] it's from is in Japanese, but has several other pics showing front/back/side.

Oh, here's [winsupersite.com] one more, even closer up, from SuperSite.

Re:make it play vorbis

[OctaneZ]

Not all MP3 player companies are using the ASIC MP3 decoders. iRiver [iriver.com] the company that produces the CD MP3 players that Rio rebrands as their own is using ARM processors and is actively developing Ogg support for their players.

Thier New Player [iriver.com] the SlimX [iriver.com] is really quite neat looking, some pictures are provided here [attbi.com].

If you are looking for discussions about MP3/etc players I recoment MP3's Portables [mp3.com] message board.

-OctaneZ

Re:Huh?

[sct]

Actually they changed the name to apease Apple. The new name is XPlay. It can be found at http://www.mediafour.com/products/xplay/ [mediafour.com].

But it is still in pre-release mode- looking at it I would say it is almost beta quality. I like the iPod, and might pick one up- but I need access to it, I hear the old style iMacs are going cheap and will run OS 10.1.

MP3 CD players

[duren686]

Personally, in terms of money per storage space, I like my MPTrip clone [genica.com].. I rarely ever listen to more than 11 hours of music at a time, and this thing works wonderfully. Despite the warning on the page, it actually does read CD-RW's, and when I have to change it, it takes about 9 minutes and I'm done. Best of all, this thing is er.. competitively priced [easybuy2000.com], and it's a very high-quality first-gen mp3/cd player.

If you're willing to spend a bit more and don't mind not having Duren686's Personal Seal of Approval, you can try the AVC Soul Player [easybuy2000.com]. I've never used one, but I've heard nothing but good about it, and as an added bonus, the upgradeable firmware gives it the possibility of reading OGG files.

Re:make it play vorbis

[duren686]

I know it's slightly redundant, but I figure in this thread it'll get more OGG-related attention.

The Soul Player [easybuy2000.com] is firmware-upgradeable, so if they see enough people wanting Ogg Vorbis support, they can write an upgrade to have the thing read (and play!) the format, and all you'd have to do is burn the update to a CD-RW.

Or, alternatively, some ambitious hacker-type person could figure out the firmware format, and write their own Soul Ogg decoder.

Moodlogic

[elrond1999]

Rio now uses Moodlogic to sort mp3s automagicaly into genres and moods ;) I think moodlogic is excelent ;) More users should try it..

http://forums.moodlogic.net/thread.jsp?forum=7&t hr ead=52

Re:make it play vorbis

[n6mod]

What will it take to get them to support vorbis !?!?!?!

An integer Vorbis decoder. How many times do I have to shout this from the rooftops. Excluding the hardware-decoder players, <SARCASM> which are doomed to failure because they won't play Microsoft's decreed format, </SARCASM> every one of the current crop of players could play Vorbis, if there were an integer decoder. None of these machines have FPUs and they certainly don't have enough horsepower for FPU emulation to keep up with an audio stream.

If the Vorbis team would make an integer-only decoder happen "now" instead of "eventually", they'd see a lot more market adoption. Microsoft figured this out, why can't Vorbis?

Archos Recorder 20 is worth the wait

[Zarnoff]

Archos has a 20GB mp3 player/recorder (analog and digital hardware mp3 encoding on the fly), it's only slightly larger than the iPod and uses USB2.0 (about 12MB/sec, not firewire but a vast improvement over USB1.0).

It's $369 and available Feb. 1

http://www.archos.com/us/products/product_500277.h tml [archos.com]
http://www.archos.com/order_desk_na.html [archos.com]

-z

Recharge via USB?

[Ryano]

Nobody has mentioned the fact that the iPod recharges its battery via FireWire when you plug it into your computer. Is this even possible with USB? I know that USB delivers power, but is it sufficient to recharge this device's 10-hour battery within a reasonable time?

The iPod does come with a power adaptor, but you only need to worry about it if you're travelling, and don't have access to a FireWire-equipped PC.