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Downloading From the RIO 59

Posted by CmdrTaco from the RIAA-is-gonna-hate-this dept.
Trey writes "MP3 Place reported this. Previously you could ONLY upload files to the Rio, and you could only upload Mp3 files. With the Riogeo program, you can now upload and download any file format, With this, you'll have a 32 MB portable drive! Currently it is a simple DOS command line prog." What about a Linux port? More importantly, what is the RIAA gonna think about this? Maybe the next Rio (or comparable product) will have sync capabilities like a pilot- just connect with your friends and trade tunes? Oh dear, this industry is going to get crazy real fast.
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Downloading From the RIO More

Downloading From the RIO

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  • Linux version exists! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Been around for quite some time now.... Relatively speaking: http://tx.us.mi rrors.freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/01/19/916773388. html [freshmeat.net] Cheers, Russ

  • Another call for help from /. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hey, anyone out there find a 32 meg upgrade for the Rio yet.. I've been searching relentlessly... no luck so far...

    thanks..

  • Audio Home Recording Act (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A few interesting articles from www.minidisc.org [minidisc.org]
    • An e-mail from the RIAA [connact.com] stating why it allows CD to Minidisc copies and not CD to hard-drive/MP3 copies. (They collect money from the Minidisc manufacturers to offset potential illegal copying!)

    • The last paragraph of this article [beacham.com] shows how perverse the whole situation is:

      The issue here is not really one of tape piracy. If the music industry really wants to stop its CDs from being copied digitally, it can easily put "flags" in the digital signal that would prohibit all copying. However, a 1989 study by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment found that about one-quarter of all pre-recorded music purchases were made after the consumer heard the artist or recording on a home-made (pirated) tape. It turns out that a little piracy, if it's not overdone, is good for the music business.

    • this is also confirmed in this interview with Geffen's director of technology [connact.com]:

      Easton: So you're saying that we're better off, that a record company may be better off with people out there pirating audio off the 'Net because that could conceivably increase your sales . . .

      Griffin: Yes . . .

  • Posted by junkpit von lederhosen:

    So have any of y'all actually used RioGeo yet? Does it work to dl stuff from the Rio, as claimed? I don't have a Rio so I can't test...

    Ditto those q's for David Weekly's hack.
  • So far, my Linux driver experience is limited to network driver work.

    Since I don't have a RIO device yet, it would probably make more sense to write the filesystem module first; that can be nicely tested over other block devices without having an actual rio. I can use your program as a test tool to generate and read disk images; if it's compatible with your program, it's highly likely that it will work with the Rio.

    Maybe someone else will end up writing the block device driver in the meantime and then we put the two together. If not, something could probably be hacked (using the ram disk or IDE code as an example perhaps).

    My only concern is how much time to take away from the freeware macro preprocessor I'm currently working on (which, although of lesser political value, could be of much more benefit to the hacker community than kernel support for an MP3 player).

    Anyway, enough clap-trap, time to look at some code.
  • There is already a Linux program that can do this; and the URL was already posted to Slashdot some time ago. What's more, the program is open-source.

    It turns out that the Rio is in fact a random-access block device with a block size of 32K.

    I'm thinking of writing a Linux block device driver that will treat the Rio as yet another hard drive, so you could mount your ext2fs on it. Also, a filesystem module ``riofs'' that would let you mount the RIO file system. This way you could just use good old ``mount'', ``unmount'', ``cp'' and ``rm'' to manage the MP3's in the Rio rather than using some specialized command line program. And of course whatever GUI file manager you may currently use should also be compatible. In other words, the integration of Rio into Linux would be a heck of a lot better. Also the problem of having to run a suid root program would go away.

    What do you slashdotters think?

  • Right (Score:1)

    by Zarquon ( 1778 )
    The point to this is that while the files can be downloaded to a computer, they can't be connected to each other as yet. This probably would need some sort of intermediary device, which means they have not violated any laws (the person circumventing the copying restrictions is).
  • Why? Because, if people can upload and download ANYTHING to their Rios, then the Rio becomes a simple "storage device" which just happens to have the extra feature of being able to play back MP3's. Then RIAA will probably not be able to touch it, considering it doesn't seem to be able to touch the makers of any other storiage device.
  • Thanks AC ....


    Ron
  • Don't forget that cassettes, as with all analog recording devices, have the problem of generational decay, i.e. a copy of a copy of a copy doesn't sound anywhere near as good as the original. This works to the RIAA's advantage, because pirated tapes can only spread for a couple of generations before the quality degrades too much to be listenable. Either way, the quality is going to be worse than the CD, so if you get a bootleg cassette, and you like the music, you'll probably want to buy the original to get the best quality.

    Naturally, this limitation doesn't apply to digital media, because the n'th generation copy is bit-for-bit identical with the original. This is why the RIAA was so scared of DAT when it came out (and through legal wrangling managed to essential kill the format), and later MiniDisc and now MP3. The only difference is that, because MP3 is open, they can't extort any money from the makers as they seem to have done with MD.

    -Jake
  • so what's the big deal?

  • I just got a Rio, and the documentation implies that it does have some kind of SCMS support in it. I guess the acid test would be to make an MP3 with the "copyright" bit set and the "original" bit reset, and see if a non-Diamond upload utility can stick it on the Rio.

  • Thanks for the mention...and for those doubters, you CAN both upload and download with my patch to the Rio utilites: trust me, I've tested it. =)
    David E. Weekly (dew)

  • Well (Score:1)

    by Chas ( 5144 )

    I find it hard to be at all sympathetic to those money-grubbing bastards who call themselves RIAA.

    The sooner we pull them down, the better.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • The stupid "music industry" has gone and set itself up to take the heat from its own favored "fight the power" meme. The "disaffected teen" group, their primary market, is the group most likely to attack them over this. If they were trying to shoot themselves in the foot, their aim could not have been better.
  • When we originally hacked the protocol, we only wrote a minimal program to demonstrate the usage, based on our work on the MpMan (which does both upload and download with equal facility - unlike the Rio). We don't have the time for the fs code, so it would be great to see this implemented. I have to say though, the engineering in the MpMan is way better than in the Rio.

  • RioGeo (Score:1)

    by hazeii ( 5702 )
    I need to look into this in the morning, but at present it seems that the author is using our work, claiming that they are releasing under GPL but the download is BINARY ONLY FOR WINDOWS and source code is *NOT INCLUDED*. Our code works under W95/98 as well as Linux, and all source is available at the URL above. I will contact the author of RioGeo and request that a) as our code is GPL, he includes his source in the download and b) we are credited as requested in our copyright.
  • Trading songs between friends would be awesome. I think anyone outside of the record industry would LOVE that.

    Too bad that record companies can't see past the end of their wallets... Im sure most musicians would also support this capability for people to share thier music. (at least the ones that arent famous and rich yet) If a musician is playing and writing music for the love of music, he will want to share it... And get at least recognition when he writes good music... Much like the way the open source developers write for the love of it and generally are psyched when they get recognition for thier labor of love...
  • I understand that because of the recent software releases, Diamond is changing the copy protection feature (preventing D/L from the RIO), from the software side, and incorperating it in the hardware of future revisions... so for those who want a 32MB Ramdrive, get them NOW!!! Personally, I'd rather get a biscut PC, or perhaps the one running the webserver, and add a zip drive to that... 100M, and cheaper per MB... :)
    Time flies like an arrow;
  • .. It will be before the NSA bans RIO's from their campus like the Furby?

    "Put down the walkman and come out with your hands up!"

    ~Grell

    "We gladly feast on those who would subdue us ... not just pretty words, Fester." -
    Morticia Addams

  • "You're going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyenas!"

    Jay (=
    (I might have to buy one of these...)
  • Would that new Iomega Clik drive work with this?

    According to Iomega's info, you stick a CompactFlash memory card into one end of the drive and a Clik disk into the other.

    Could you just carry around a Clik drive, and a pile of disks? I guess it'll depend on if you can download info fromt he disk TO the card at this point.

    I know we're getting too unwieldy... maybe another commercial MP3 player will incorporate such a drive in the future.

    Jay (=
  • Fuck 'em.
    Long live MP3!

    heheh

    friscoz3@usa.net
    LwZ rawx
  • Why do you think that mp3 hurts the record companies? They're fucking idiots, just like you. I've said this millions of times before, I respect the artists, so if I like their mp3s, I buy their CDs! Is that too deep for you, kiddie? Were you one of those 7 people who voted for less than 40 on the IQ poll? I bet you were. Anyway, the RIAA blows. 'nuff said
  • fuck, that's a bit expensive..

  • DAT! (Score:1)

    by Timex ( 11710 )
    it wasn't so long ago that the recording industry was going bonkers over DAT, remember? they were screeching like so many banshees over how clear the sounds were and everything...

    the DAT stuff had been available oversees (Japan?) for a long time, but not in the US for this very reason. even NOW, you don't see DAT much for personal entertainment.... (well, -I- don't see it around!)

    _______
  • Yeah, but as the initial article mentioned, this literally turns the Rio into nothing more than a portable HD with an audio-out plug. The day the RIAA tries to get my portable HD or PC tagged as a recording device is the day they get the big fat-fingered Dis they deserve...
  • You can also download from the Rio using WinNT...
    To do this, download RioShell (http://w3.to/rioshell/)... ;-)))

    Bye

    DElyMyth
  • Looks like they got slash-dotted into promising Linux support! Good work, people!

    I bought a Rio yesterday, and have already concluded that 32MBytes is NOT enough. And it looks like the Rio can only address 64MBytes, which is still not enough. I'm thinking somewhere around 0.5 to 1 GBytes should be sufficient... when are those 512MByte flash modules going to come out?

    Even if massive Internet bandwith becomes dirt cheap, there will still be a demand for MP3, 'cause flash will still be expensive!
  • Umm... that defeats the original purpose of a small, lightweight device that I can go running with. If I wanted to play songs off a hard drive, I'd just use the 8 GByte drive in my PC!

    Of course, I'm assuming here that flash will rapidly come down in price, eventually making 512MByte modules no more expensive than 32MByte modules are today. Remember, 15 years ago people couldn't imagine the PC would ever need more than 640KBytes of memory...
  • Yes, hard drives are much cheaper per byte than flash, and will probably continue to be. However, if you bump a hard drive will it's spinning, it tends to crash the read/write head into the disk, ruining that section of the disk surface and possible the read/write head. Last time I checked, flash rams had no moving parts. Ammortized over several years of you constantly replacing your 1.5" HDD, the flash is cheaper!

    The lack of moving parts also makes them much better in terms of power consumption. Why do you think a Palm Pilot can go for a month on a battery, while the average Laptop dies is less than 2 hours? How long do you think the single 1.5v AA battery in a Rio could keep your 1GByte HDD spinning? Certainly not long enough to listen to all the music on it!

    HDD are good for non-portable applications. Flash is used for portable applications because of it's low power, long life, fast access speed, and far superior resistance to harsh environments, e.g. shock, temperature, humidity, magnetic, etc.

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