Rio Riot and Lyra Personal Jukebox 403
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."
Still USB (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for one, will stick with my iPod.
iPod Crusher maybe? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Still USB (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
This thing is no iPod killer. The great thing about the iPod is that I can put it in my pocket, and the firewire interface is so fast that I don't need to put ALL of my MP3s on it: it takes only seconds to load a fresh collection.
Still just an mp3 player? (Score:1, Insightful)
Huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's funny. I had heard that the iPod was lame. [slashdot.org] Why would we need an iPod killer?
(In any case, it's still using USB. That's gotta be painful for moving 20GB of music...)
design (Score:4, Insightful)
[1] noted exeptions: palm's computers and the sony playstation 2
iPod killer? Hardly. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Riot has a USB interface... the iPod uses FireWire (1394b). End result? You can completely replace the contents on your iPod in less than 15 minutes. Even loading 5gb onto the Rio is going to take something like 10 hours -- 20gb would likely take something like *two days*.
It is unbelievably handy/convenient/cool to be able to reload your entire portable music collection in a matter of minutes. I can get up in the morning and select 500+ tracks -- 50 albums or several playlists (depending on how I have things organized) -- based on my mood, desires, whatever... and the iPod is completely reloaded and ready to go by the time I'm out of the shower and ready to catch the train!
All in a device that slips conveniently into a pocket, is light weight, and incredibly tough. Did you know an iPod bounces when you drop it? Mine does-- and it still works fine.
Not too mention that having a 5gb FireWire hard drive in my pocket has proven to be damned convenient on numerous occasions. My iPod was used as a temporary holding spot for data or for sneaker net transfers no less than 4 times last week simply because it was the fastest and most convenient way to move the data around! USB wouldn't have cut it-- try moving 1gb of data across a USB bus in under a minute. (Sure, USB 2.0 can do it-- but who has USB 2.0 support on their MP3 player?)
Don't get me wrong-- the Riot is *very cool*. But it isn't an iPod killer. They are completely different products.
Personally, I don't need an FM tuner and really don't want a device that doesn't fit in a pocket.
There will be those that will reply with 'but do you *really* swap your entire playlists on a regular basis? I don't and I don't miss it...'
Re:Very nice (Score:1, Insightful)
Size/Weight, and iPod (Score:3, Insightful)
I own an iPod, and I prefer having a tiny device, that i can fit in my pocket, or even in the cellphone compartment on my bag. Also, the riot is still USB, i couldnt even imagine how long it would take to fill up the drive. I have a hard time waiting for the three or four minutes it takes to fill up my ipod.
Everyone also says that the 5gb on the ipod is not enough, and i thought that also, until i got one. I can hold around 700 songs encoded at 192k on the hard drive, which is 2 days worth of music. Now when are you going to listen to the complete 8 days worth of music on your Riot?
I want a 0gb MP3 player (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
This thing is no iPod killer. The great thing about
I'm sick of hearing this. "Firewire is in many new PCs and sound cards, and it is a zillion times faster!"
I have a 40 gig USB HD for my iOpener-based car MP3 player. It took me about 11 hours to completely upload all 34 gigs of my music to it. When I want to add music, I plug it into my PC (or almost *ANY* PC or Mac, since USB *IS* ubiquitous at this point), it mounts, and I spend 10 minutes putting another couple of albums worth of music onto it.
If the initial load is *THAT* important to you-- that is you want your favorite 5 gigs uploaded in 15 minutes, instead of a couple of hours-- then pay the premium. I personally am willing to let the thing run overnight once to get my favorite 20 gigs onto it.
Fact is, with the Riot you're getting a device with 4 times the storage space, plus an FM tuner, for the same price. Oh, and you get a carrying case, too!
The gee-whiz effect Mr. Jobs used to have on me is gone. I marvel at the products, gasp at the price, then leave some other (more liquid) consumer to pay the premium.
Re:Still USB (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm using the money I save to build another server.
Re:make it play vorbis (Score:2, Insightful)
What will it take to get them to support vorbis !?!?!?!
Re:Still USB (Score:2, Insightful)
3 hours 47 minutes and 33 seconds
How often do you plan to wipe all 20 gigs? I can't see doing this very often.
For my taste, 20, or even 5, gigs is way more than I need. The MXP-100 [edigital-store.com] has up to a gig, and its weight is close to that of the 64 MB players.
The real beauty is that you can buy a unit without memory ($149), pick up a cheap compact flash card and use that until the gigabyte microdrive becomes reasonable or is a "deal of the day" at buy.com.
I don't see how any other player could be the "geek's choice."
It's bigger though... (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess they could have released an iPod at a cheaper price w/more storage, but then it'd be just as large as the other options out there.
Re:Still USB (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still USB (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it is pointless for devices that you might never want to hook up to a computer :-)
I don't know anyone who does that, which doesn't make it useless, but does make it less valuable. In fact everyone I know with a DV cam would much rather put the movie on their computer and edit it in iMovie or something.
In fact the one place I know people wanted to use device-to-device FW it failed them. None of the new high end DSLRs want to look for a hard drive to write files on, they all want to have a computer suck them out. So no using the cute little portable firewire disks to store digital pics in the field, you need a bulky laptop, or a costly "digital wallet", and definitely no expensing the iPod for use as a storage device with your EOS-1D...
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
If price were the only feature that people based their decisions on, then why are people driving the new VW bugs? This HDD may be 20GB but if I'm carrying around a 20GB HDD, and I find myself needing to take a couple gigs of photoshop files home from the office or vice versa, I sure as hell wouldn't use this to do it! An iPod would be right on task, though.
Someone could produce a portable player with a 160GB Desktop HDD powered by a lawnmower battery with a small color screen that you could carry around in your backpack (included of course) for the same price as the Rio Riot or the iPod. It could make you download all your files via a 115200 baud serial connection, and then I could dish out the same argument you just did to defend it.
Seriously, it's a different product for a different market. It may be a bit pricey, but then again, it's your choice to buy it or not. If apple could price iPod cheaper and it would increase the demand for it enough that it would benefit them to lower the price -- you know what -- they would. They have smart marketing people setting the price on their stuff. It's not like they just make it more expensive because they want to see who's stupid enough to buy it.
~GoRK
More info... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DV editing on FireWire… (Score:5, Insightful)
iMovie is also about $900 cheaper (or is it "only" $600 cheaper?), and people have done more then home movies in it. I do admit that FCP3 is far less limited, and if you need 10 video tracks and more then 3 audio tracks, and cuts/fades/effects not in the 80 or so iMovie has, then it is a much better thing to use. iMovie is a lot more then a toy, it's a great starter tool. FCP3 is a lot better, but frequently not needed.
You are not likely to ever get the CD writer in the Mavica as fast as the faster flash cards (or maybe even the microdrives). You want to bust on iMovie for being a toy, and then you talk about the Mavica? The D30's the bomb :-) Or really the EOS-1D, I mean don't you need 8 frames per second and huge image buffer? Doesn't everyone need to have a five stop correction range and ISO 3200? :-)
The 3" CD writere will also always be bigger then CF writers, so you won't see a digital ELPH (PS100/PS110) using one. They are almost as small as the iPod after all...
Re: iPod killer (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, I'm sorry, you were trolling and looking for l00sers. Carry on.
Hard Drives in MP3 Players (Score:3, Insightful)
- Battery life. A hard drive contains moving parts that need to be spun, and that sucks up battery life. Laptops spin down their hard drives often to lengthen battery life. Thse players may do that as well, storing the current song in memory, but "spinning up" the drive to copy it to memory is still going to take a lot more out of the battery than a flash memory card. One AA battery lasts 30 hours in my Rio PMP300.
- Hard drives fail. I've seen plenty of desktop hard drives fail. I can't imagine the failure rate for drives that bounce around during your morning jog or your morning race to catch the train. My Rio has taken a lot of abuse over the last 3 years, and I've never had a problem.
If you want to carry 4,000 songs with you, it's great that you can do that, but are there companies still providing new options for people who aren't moonlighting DJs?This is not a portable unit (Score:2, Insightful)
As far as firewire concerned, its only useful when you put your collection on the player for the first time. After that, most people will update their player with a few tracks at a time for which the speed of USB is surely enough.
Why the anti-Apple bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then we have the "iPod killer" from Rio. Eh? The thing looks like it's the size of a brick, and I'm sure just as fun to carry around. And why is the Rio "priced competatively"? They used all cheaper components than the iPod, yet charge the same price? And that's competative? And the iPod is "overpriced" because it uses higer quality components for the same price? What the hell are you people smoking? The iPod uses a brand new high tech hard drive which lets the whole iPod be the size of just the hard drive in the Rio. The Rio is plastic, versus metal for the iPod (can you say more durable?) And what makes the reviewer think the interface is better than Apple's? Has dschuetz actually used either one? I doubt it.
Is it going to show up as a generic USB mass storage device? Or am I going to have to use some half-assed experimental driver to get it to work under Linux? I would say the chance of Linux support is low based upon the support they've given their other products. Sonic Blue might use Linux internally in their products, but have they provided Linux drivers for anything? Ever? Certainly not for their MP3 players. As far as I can tell, any MP3 player which doesn't show up as a generic mass storage device (like the iPod does) is nothing but a Window's centric RIAA-pandering product. I don't know why Slashdot editor would think that was cool. The only reason to not have an MP3 player act as a generic mass storage device is to keep the RIAA happy. And unless the company actually provides Linux drivers (which Sonic Blue does not) you are resigning yourself to half-assed buggy support. Bah.
Re:Huh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if it cost, say, $449, early adopters will spend it, justifying the R&D because in a year or so it's a volume product at $249 and they are selling a new, smaller, 20 gig version back to the same early adopters for $449.
Then go get an IEEE-1394 interface card! (Score:3, Insightful)
Has anyone bothered to actually go to a computer store and check out the pricing for PCI-slot IEEE-1394 interface cards? They're relatively inexpensive, and best of all drivers are available on the PC platform for Linux and Windows 9X variants (Windows XP supports it natively).
You want to have an IEEE-1394 interface for your computer anyway if you're doing any video editing work with video downloaded from a MiniDV format camcorder; a lot of professional-quality digital still cameras now sport IEEE-1394 interfaces also.
Anyway, most of the Compaq and HP computers you see sold at Best Buy, CompUSA, OfficeMax, Staples, and so on already sport an IEEE-1394 connector, so a portable MP3 player with a small hard drive that exclusively uses the IEEE-1394 interface is not as handicapped in the marketplace as many people think.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well... for a car stereo, I quite agree with you. Most people don't spend enough time in their cars to need constantly updated 5GB of mp3s, and the beauty of it being in a car is... you don't have to carry it.
The appeal of the iPod is that its drive is big enough that you can have a lot of variety in your music (more than the album 64MB players give you, or the small collection a single CD in a CD player gives you), and its fast enough that if it still doesn't hold all of your music, it can be switched over quickly.
Something like the Riot, or your 40GB car unit, however, can only really be usable with incremental changes in their storage. If your needs ever outgrow it (I do know a few people who can/will overflow 40GB, and you yourself have already topped 20GB), it loses a lot of utility. And, of course, you won't be carrying your iOpener when you go jogging, or this Riot either.
It bears repeating: the iPod isn't revolutionary or neat or interesting because it's completely new, but because it was clearly designed from the ground up to be used the way people would like to use an mp3 player. It's big enough that you could listen to it all day without hearing a repeat, it's small enough that you can carry it with you where ever you go all day, and it's fast enough that it doesn't have to hold all of your music to be useful.
SMDI and everything else people seem to forget (Score:2, Insightful)
As for this whole firewire vs usb, the issue is not the speed, its the fact that you can use firewire to power up the player. That's what makes me want an iPod over my Archos. However 20GB is way better then 5GB, as it stands I can only fit 20% of my cd collection on a 20GB drive, I want the whole collection on my player. Back to the powering up though, take anything but the iPod on the road and you either are spending a fortune on batteries or you are carrying some bulky ass charger with you. Not to mention the fact that the iPod has a better battery then just about anything out there...
Re:Priced Competitively? (Score:1, Insightful)
i pod killer hahahaha (Score:2, Insightful)
1. iPod is the size of a deck of cards, the Riot is bigger
2. iPod uses firewire, Riot uses usb. can you say slow
3.The iPod also acts as a portable hard drive
4. It doesnt auto synch with anything
5. Doesnt work with iTunes.
iPod killer, no f$#@ing way, its the same as every other mp3 player only with more storage space. Sorry Rio, please try again
Kind of Like (Score:3, Insightful)
In this analogy, the iPod is a shiny, brand new 911. A wonderfully and carefully engineered piece of precision machinery. An art form.
The Rio product is heavy, clunky, and ugly. It really only beats the iPod in one area: capacity. So what? Would you rather fill an iPod with six gigs of music in five minutes, or fill the Rio with 20 gigs in five hours? Hmmmm.
The two products being compared cost the same . . . .
And to those who complain about the fact that not every PC has firewire: Anybody with a screwdriver and a spare 10 minutes can add firewire for about $30. Get over it.