Rio PMP 300 MP3 Player

Rating:
Summary: WOW! THE BEST THING TO HAPPEN TO MUSIC!
Review: The RIO rocks! It is so great that Diamond Multimedia prevailed in their fight against the forces of pure evil in the music industry and allowed us, the public, to have the RIO! This little baby holds your MP3's and plays them with outrageous quality and no moving parts! You simply cannot make the music "skip". Take it jogging, bob sledding, whatever! The Rio is cute and compact, battery lasts forever, runs great and is really simple to use. Works well with the PC linkup, etc. A hot item!

Rating:
Summary: Great for people with internet not for people without
Review: It is good if you have internet than you can download the stuff, else, you can't

Rating:
Summary: Sounds like a good idea.... But leaves much to be desired
Review: I bought my Rio about 2 months ago. It plays perfectly, and I have no complaints with the performance. But if you are going to take this with you as a truely "portable" unit you are going to be stuck with only 30 minutes of storage for cd quality music. Maybe that's not a problem for you, but personally I need more of a variety of music when I take this on a trip. And the extra 32-meg flash memory cards cost $100!! That's way too much just to hold an extra 30 minutes of music. I recently sold my Rio and purchased a portable Minidsic player/recorder for $275. My advice to people would be to save an extra $100 and go for the minidisc. It uses digital sound, and does not skip. You can use it to record mp3's from your computer and the blank 74 minute discs cost less than $5 a piece, as opposed to $100 for a 30-minute flash memory card for the Rio. Minidisc is a much better overall value than the Rio. I would not recomend any buy a portable mp3 player until the storage can be greatly increased at a much lower cost.

Rating:
Summary: waste of money!
Review: i got one of these a LONG time ago for christmas. it was the first mp3 player i have owned and it did serve me well for quite some time.

firstly, i have to credit this piece of crap as being the first mp3 player marketed and almost didn't make it for legal problems. sound quality is ok.

now the problems: firstly, there is a MAJOR design flaw regarding the battery cradle (holder, whatever). the door fits over the end of the battery and contains the negative terminal. door is held in place by a small plastic hook and WILL break! i had them replace it once! also, as it gets older and takes even light abuse i found that the solder joint on the negative terminal breaks which forced me to open the damn thing and resolder it to the board. my solution? get a single AA battery holder from radio shack, remove the old battery cradle inside the rio, cut a nice big rectangular pocket out of the side of the case with my dremel (to accompany the new battery clip) and solder the wires of that to the board of the rio. and then i attached it to the case with hot glue. yes its ghetto but it worked way better than diamond's solution!

secondly, we all know about the lack of OS support. just sick there...there's beta thrid party software that'll do it on xp, but it sucks. 32mb of memory isn't enough. i got the 32mb flash card and 64mb isn't enough!

ahh the flash card....would be nice if the rio properly detected it even half the time. something is desperately wrong with the memory controller and most of the time it can't even detect the card let alone play anything off it. to fix that, i kept hitting it. stop laughing, it worked. but then after a while it started turning the volume up and down on its own....

so in conclusion i can't recomend this piece of crap to anyone. my final solution was to get the creative MuVo TX FM (256mb) and then i gave the rio 300 to my girlfriend. haha i know....but it still works. too poor to buy her a real mp3 player yet.

Rating:
Summary: Piece of [junk] if you ask me..
Review: Well yes it is a Mp3 Player... and I have used it for three years... but now I can't get support for it from either Sonic blue OR RIo. Like this product has been completely abandoned... they told me that I would either have to downgrade my operating system or buy a new player. Niether solution is a very good way to treat your customers and they have completely lost me. Now I desperatly search the internet for a alternative softwear package. DON'T DO IT!!! LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Awful Machine and Customer Service
Review: After about a year of service, the link between my machine and the computer stopped working. I attempted to get te problem fixed by calling "customer service" and was put on hold for a ridiculous length of time. Then I was told to download a useless interface. The end result is that I am going to get a new MP3 player that isn't made by this manufacturer.