Rating: 
Summary: Great MP3 player
Review: I purchased this from Audible for 99 bucks about 13 months ago. As an audio book device this is a wonderful player. Upgrade with another 64 MB Smart Media card and you'll get about 9 hours of very good quality spoken word. As a music player it is good but not great. Not enough memory for more than an hour or two of good quality music. The 500 has a quality feel to it that other players do not. It has the look and feel of a first generation device that was over built and probably wasn't intended to make a large profit. Very small, slips into a pocket and is rugged enough to stand up to a fair amount of abuse. Great battery life compared to a minidisc player I used to use - at least 12 honest hours of playback on a single AA battery. Subsequent Rio mp3 players are bigger and aren't as elegant as the 500. Forget the included software. Download RIOsitude from hotfiles.com. A free program that is intuitive to use, fast and reliable. As good as this player is the Apple iPod has established a new benchmark for portable players. The Apple uses a 5 GB microdrive which hasn't proven itself yet in terms of reliability but is certainly a step in the right direction. Bottom line is that the 500 is a supremely good audio book device, a great spoken word device, a good music player but too little memory for more than a couple hours of high quality audio.
Rating:
Summary: Neat little gadget
Review: I recently purchased the Rio 500 to download books for a long international trip. When I got the product (through audible.com), I was pleasantly surprised by the small size and streamline look. The instructions (or lack thereof) leaves little to be desired,however. It was pretty easy to set things up in retrospect but at the time I had some trouble figuring out how to use the software and the actual mp3 player itself. I was happy to be able to download nearly 28 hours of audio books into my player. Like everyone else had mentioned already, the earphones are terrible. I couldn't hear the player even at the loudest volume on the plane so I had to get a new set of earphones for the return trip and that worked like a charm. I haven't yet downloaded music yet but I'm looking forward to doing so as I've been reading that the quality is excellent. Overall, I am pretty happy with my Diamond Rio 500, but I had to knock off a star for the poor instructions, earphones, and included software.
Rating:
Summary: Best available
Review: I'm really enjoying the Rio; use a different headset though for better sound. Only real negative is that it doesnt support NT....but then I dont think any MP3 players do....I am very satisfied!
Rating: 
Summary: Practical Player with great expandible option
Review: I've had this player for over a year and I must say that it has given excellent performance and reliability. The controls are well organized, and I'm surprised at all the capabilities of the player given the minimal amount of buttons. I thought that instructions could have been more clear on how to use the programming functions and bookmarking functions, but other than those two things everything was fantastic. The battery life is excellent, and the display is very easy to read. The two things that impress me the most, however, is the expansion slot for smartmedia cards. They now sell a 128mb expansion card for only about 85 bucks after discount and rebate. This expands the player's memory to an amazing 192 mb for a price that is way more practical than the price of a Rio800 or the expansion packs for the other new rios. Those expansion backpacks are [bad]. The only reason they switched is so customers could not use something as ubiquitous and mass produced as smartmedia cards. I also thought that it was great that Rio has updates on the firmware of the player, thus as technology progresses, they accomodate by including new features, such as operability with larger smartmedia cards. In terms of software, I've had no problems with the Rio Audio manager for all the time I've had it. The headphones are ok, but I recommend buying a quality headphone, it makes the biggest difference in terms of music experience. I've scoured for better mp3 players and its been about a year and a half and I still think the rio500 is still the best bang for your bucks. Audible.com is offering them at a great price right now as well. Don't be fooled by large memory big prices and slick designs, its about expandibility, simplicity, and affordability...three things that sets this player apart from its peers.
Rating:
Summary: A great product if you are on the go and hate radio hype.
Review: Love to work out to music, but hate flipping through the channels to escape the blah-blah-blah of egotistical radio personalities? Frustrated with positioning a bulky CD player out of your way? I found the Rio500 MP3 player to be the best thing since sliced bread. Not being a high-tech kind of gal, yet somewhat intelligent, I was able to figure out most of the software/hardware without instructions. For the part I didn't understand, I e-mailed Rio tech support and had a full set of instructions waiting for me the next day. In my humble opinion, the sound quality is great, especially when compared to the static-ridden walkman I was used to. I suppose there will be bigger and better in the future, but for now, it was worth every hour of overtime I spent to get it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Hardware -- Disappointing Software
Review: Needless to say, this is not just a review of the "purple" model of the Rio 500. My remarks apply equally to the "teal" and "silver"I have bought each of the previous Rio models as they came out, which makes me either an expert or a nut. But the advantages I was looking forward to on this model included the USB transfer speed and the backlighted display with song information. On these counts I was well satisfied. The USB speed is roughly two to three times as fast as the parallel port speed of the previous models. Certainly not the five times that Diamond claims, but welcome nonetheless. And the backlit display is OK - a little small, but OK. Like the previous "Special Edition" model, this Rio comes with 64MB of storage with the ability to put 96MB on line using optional 32MB SmartMedia cards. The sound is excellent when listening to songs recorded at 128Kb/s. The controls are frankly not as convenient as the uglier "round" control was. There is now a slider switch that controls on/off/hold, and that's not clever. Because now when you want to slide the switch to "hold" to lock the buttons at their current settings, it's too easy to slide it too far -- to "off." There are also "browse" and "multi" buttons on the side, the latter being a Sony-style rotate-and-push control. The logic of which button controls what is not clear, and on my player there was no manual in the box, on disc or on the Web. So you're pretty much on your own. But here's the real disappointment: the software. The old Rio Manager was a simple transfer program that let you choose songs from your hard disc or wherever and transfer them to the Rio with little complication. A separate piece of included software (MusicMatch) did the ripping and created the database, if you wanted that. This time out, the Rio Audio Manager does everything, but not too well. To start, it will refuse to transfer anything to your player that is not in its "database", so you have to use their database even if you already have your own or don't want one. Second, it will refuse to add songs to the database if they reside in directories it doesn't like. For example, if you have some files on your Windows Desktop that you would like to transfer to the Audio Manager or to your player -- forget it. Audio Manager doesn't approve of people keeping MP3 files on their Windows Desktop. And if the files don't meet its own standards, it won't load them either. I had some files recorded earlier which played fine on all other softwre players and on my earlier Rios. They will not load on the new Audio Manager. Want more? When searching for MP3 files on your computer, the software will not look on a Jaz drive or a network drive. Once again, it decides where you should store these files. You begin to long for the simplicity and non-judgmental nature of the old Rio Manager. The software has lots of other problems, some of which could perhaps be solved with a manual. For example, I could not get the new software to work with the older Rio. I happened to stumble on a batch file that does the trick, but you always have to run the batch file before loading the program for it to recognize the right player. Not too clever. Wouldn't it be great to just slect some files in Explorer and drag them to a Rio icon? The database idea is very big now, and everyone wants their MP3-related site to be some kind of portal. But the battling desktop databases really reduce the functionality for everyone. Since I still use the database from the MusicMatch software I got with my first Rio, I am hoping that it will soon support the PMP500. Final Verdict: The PMP500 is a great little player that will benefit from big improvements in the software. You may want to wait until other, better software supports the player.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: The Rio 500 is a great product. It comes with headphones, a carrying case, instructions and a USB connector. I really like it because instead of carrying around ten cd's, each with only one or two songs I like on them, all I have to take is my rio. It is very small and doesn't weigh much. The only complaint I have is the price of the memory cards (which are used to upgrade the memory and number of songs you can have on the rio at 1 time). I highly recomend the Diamond Rio 500 to any and all music lovers.
Rating:
Summary: Great except for the short recording time
Review: When I purchased the Rio 500 I was a bit skeptical, but after I used it for a while, I quickly found out why it was so expensive. This is THE BEST MP3 player yet. It is light, downloads fast and looks pretty cool too. The only thing I was disappointed with was how many songs you could fit on the 64mb memory that was already built in. The rio500 only provides about an hour of playback time. I understand you can buy a flash memory card, but they are very expensive for only a little bit of expansion. I fixed this problem by just deleting songs that I got tired of and replacing them with ones I like. Another really cool thing about this mp3 player is that you can save all of your songs on the provided rioport audio manager and download a book...Then when your done with the book you can just delete it and reload all of your music that you can save as albums. I hope my suggestions will help you on the road to buying something that you will be satisfied of.
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