Rating: 
Summary: Looks Great, But Where's the Audio Out?!
Review: I thought this was superior to the Archos 20Gb, with better interface and FM tuner, only to be shocked to observe that the only output is via USB? Who the heck uses these things on a computer once music is loaded? Where's the output to enable an RCA jack to a stereo system so you can do away with the CD changer? I returned mine same day and bought the Archos.
Rating: 
Summary: Love it
Review: Great player for a great price. I wish the player identified itself as a drive so I could just drop media onto it like a hard drive rather than use the jukebox software though. Sounds great, holds my whole collection plus a bunch of future music. Can't complain. Sure you can get a small and quicker player for twice the price. I'll just set up the upload of my collection, go to sleep, and in the morning I'll be all done. USB really isn't as slow as the firewire folks want you to think it is. I have firewire and don't find it that impressive. Besides, how often do you plan on uploading your entire 20 gig collection anyhow?
Rating: 
Summary: not so good
Review: id say this is probobly the bottom of the line jukebox, i had it for 6 months and i traded it in for a nomad 3. the rio riot freezes way to often and deosnt hold data, but the nomad does. the rios battery is in the unit so if you run out away from any outlet your skrewed. the rio dj is probobly its only good feature, but the "entertain me" feature always chooses the same songs over and over. also the usb connection is sub-par, its really slow and the cord is a unique one that you cant buy anywhere if you break it (they made the usb and headphone the same port) the nomad has firewire and much better tech support.
Rating: 
Summary: The best of the best!
Review: when i was looking to buy a good mp3 player i came straight to the sonic blue company this player is the best of all of the mp3 players out thare.ALL THE +'s 1) you can see the screen in the dark
2) the hard drive reves up before it playes the song = no skiping
3) you will never fill up the 20 gb hd
4) the transfer rate to download the songs to mp3 player is fast ALL THE -'s
1) battery life dosent last as long as you probibly would want it to
2) if your not vary coputer inclined the software can get to be a bit hadrer than you think to set up OVER ALL i think this player rilly is the best, but like eny other product you buy it gets cind of boring pritty fast YET i recomend it to eny one who has alot of songs and injoys to lison to them ON THE GO!
Rating:
Summary: I tried it and liked it!
Review: I looked into my options before this purchase and decided 2 main things 1. iPOD is not windows compatible (otherwise I would have gotten that)
2. for USB data transfer, how often was I going to have to add LARGE amounts of data all at once? (not too often) I LIKE IT! I don't find it terribly unwieldy. It doesn't skip. I was worried about this with a hard drive model, but not an issue, even at the gym. The sound is great (yes, the included headphones are a little weenie, but honestly, anyone who's buying one of these most likely does own a GOOD pair of headphones already). The display is currently unmached. The FM tuner is a big plus.
The commonly quoted downsides are the size and the speed of the USB transfer. I won't argue with either, but honestly, I don't forsee (and haven't needed) frequent BIG transfers after the first.
Overall - I'd recommend it!
I only deduct one star (5 stars is PERFECT, right? :) ) because if this were perfect, it would be a little smaller.
Rating:
Summary: Upgrade firmware & drivers to solve major issues
Review: I was very hesitant about buying a Riot after reading some of the initial negative reviews. Well, I went ahead and bought it and have found that now most of the issues expressed in those negative reviews have been corrected through firmware (v1.9) and Win XP/2000 driver updates and the Riot has proven to be a great product for me...I noticed battery complains in several early reviews and this seems to be correctable. The firmware fixes problems with batteries draining prematurely -I upgraded right out of the box, so I never had this problem, but be sure to follow the upgrade directions and calibrate the battery after the firmware upgrade in order to prevent inaccurate battery readings (also mentioned). The other main complaint I read was pops and sound problems in MP3 files encoded under a Win XP or 2000 OS. I have never experienced these as I am running Win 98, but sonic blue contends that their driver update fixes this. It also helps if you stop running other programs while encoding music and if the software has an option to run it at a higher priority, then enable that option. As for the player, the sound is great. I encoded all 150 of my CDs as MP3s at 192Kb VBR and still have room for another 100 albums - SWEET! I have yet to try WMA but I hear the sound is even better. The battery lasts 10 hours at least and it even took me about 5+ hours to intentionally deplete it (for batter calibration) with full volume music and backlight alway on! ...You can download the trial version (20 complete luanches) of a great encoding product using the LAME standard... Using high quality encoder softare will also ensure error free songs. When you encode your CDs to mp3 files, make sure to edit the ID3 tags for accuracy and consistency as the Riot will organzie all the music around them...For instance, make sure to use the exact same artist name and genre for two albums by say The Offspring. If you put one as "Offspring" and the other as "The Offspring" it will store them as 2 separate artists and it will not be so easy to compare all the albums by The Offspring. It would be nice if the Riot used "The" as a wild card and considered all Offspring artists the same. The same goes for genre, so be careful not to store one album as say "Punk" and another by the same artist or group as "Punk Rock". I found this out the hard way and had to redo some albums. Freedb is a great tool in the encoding software for looking up albums and artists, but the user needs to monitor consistency on their own to avoid the above problems. Also consider changing the recording year of compilation albums to match the approx date of the original songs (think of the decade play lists). Definitely upgrade the RealPlayer software to the RealOne free player. To transfer music (which is not very obvious at all), go to "My Library", clear all songs (select all and delete - not required but makes it easier to manage many songs), then "Scan for Media" (file or option menu) and select only those folders with music you wish to transfer. Once all the music is added to "My Library", right click and Select All, then right click and "Copy To..." => "Rio Riot". The view should switch to the "Devices" => "Rio Riot" screen and all new songs should be added with "Ready to Transfer" status displayed in green. Click the "Transfer" button in the lower left of the window. Do this over night as large transfers can take several hours. For the most part the player has been great and I only have a few minor irritating issues, so hopefully some of these will be addressed in future firmware updates. The USB is slow, but once I transfer everything I don't expect to do large amounts again. The interface is a bit confusing at first and the Back button doesn't go back when you go from the menus to playing a song, which is kind of a pain. When you go to play music by Genre, it lists all the songs of that Genre and there is no way to see the artist or album in that view; I don't know how many people have 2000+ songs memorized, but scrolling through all songs of say the Rock category is less than helpful. A better method would be to select Genre, then Artist, then song. Also, when playing a song, the Track Info does not list the Genre, comments or year imbedded in the ID3 tag. Finally, the Song info is purposely ghosted in the background when in the menus, which is confusing at best. It would be cleaner for the volume, scroll bar and upcoming tracks or track info to disappear when in the menus, then the song and play mode could either be ghosted or remain dark, but overlapping menus and information is confusing. Of course, imported play lists would be great and just the ability to see the Riot drive as a hard drive as you do with a Digital Camera would be extremely helpful. Finally, the menus are a bit slow when viewing songs, albums, or genre lists. For the most part I have been quite happy with the Riot. It is a bit big, but I can't imagine having an even smaller screen and the player is still smaller than a Discman. Don't let a few negative reviews dissuade you - for ample music storage from a PC, the larger screen and great sound, go with The Riot. With future firmware upgrades the interface will surely continue to improve.
Rating:
Summary: If you want an easy to use, read Jukebox..
Review: this is the one. Had an Archos Studio 20 - took it back to the store because the navigation through the tiny screen was too confusing and their documentation was non-existent. Have only had the Rio a few days, but have already loaded it with about 1200 songs, taking up about 20% of the disk. Don't know what some other's have been saying about the length of time to download - just loaded about 1.5 gb in about 30 minutes. Okay, not as fast as firewire, but not horrendous either. Upgraded to the RealOne software - not the greatest, but rips a cd in about 2 minutes and easy to download your libraries. The only thing you have to watch for is to turn off the Rio after you download and then detach the USB cable, otherwise the jukebox will freeze and you will lose the last transfer. Learned the hard way...other than that, can't wait to take my 100 cds to work tomorrow in my pocket, :-). Haven't noticed any distortion as others have written either...recommend this little unit if you're looking for a portable music collection.
Rating:
Summary: Pops, skips, and artifacts in the MP3 sound
Review: This RioRiot was a bad choice. First off, the proprietary software puts you at the mercy of
Sonic Blue for future software updates and support. If this
was a generic USB disk device, any future OS that supports
generic USB devices could support it. I should have learned
that lesson from my orphaned Rio500... Second, the RealJukebox software will attempt to convince you
to "upgrade" to RealOne. RealOne won't create MP3s with greater
than 96 Kbit/sec, unless you pay [per] month to be a "RealOne"
member. Third, the sound quality is [terrible]. I run WindowsXP Home, and at
least every other file that is transferred to the RioRiot
has "artifacts", glitches, pops, etc, which are *not* apparent
when playing the MP3 file on the computer. The 'Beta' driver
which is supposed to 'fix' this problem doesn't. I'm about
ready to buy the Archos instead. Also, the first RioRiot I received was Dead on Arrival. This
ownership experience is about enough to get me to avoid Rio
products altogether.
Rating:
Summary: Great Product, but wish I would have known...
Review: I really enjoy this product. I don't have that many MP3 or WMA files so there is a lot of room (I've used 5% of the resources). One reason I bought this over the Nomad III is because it had an FM tuner built right in, however, I hardly ever use this feature since all of my music is right on the player. One big thing I wish I would have known is that THE BATTERY IS NOT REMOVABLE, it is part of the player. It is a Li-Ion battery so nothing should happen to it but if I need more juice after the built-in battery runs out I have to plug it in. Rio DJ is awesome it is much easier for an auto-playlist to be built than to build one myself (which isn't hard to do right on the player and comes in very useful). I would suggest that no matter what player you choose that the player offers WMA compatablity. WMA files at 128 kb/s are so much better than their MP3 counterparts. Do look at this the Apple iPod and the Nomad III before considering a player.
Rating:
Summary: This is a GREAT MP3 PLAYER
Review: The Rio Riot is a Great mp3 player. I would have rated it 5 stars if it had fire wire. I would also like to see a better equalizer on it, the one it has is not bad but it only has two controls one for bass and one for treble. Now for the good points, it has a 20 GB hard drive, easy to use software and a battery that last for around 7 hours of playing time. Their is firmware update on sonicblues web sight which is the 1.19 version and they have a driver update for windows xp users but it is a beta version. I downloaded both and found no problems with them. If you are in the market for a mp3 player I would highly recommend it. When you do purchase it be sure to check the different wed sights because I found a lot of different prices out there. It ranged [in price] and some sights are giving free shipping with it.
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