Right now, a slew of new electronic gadgets raise questions for consumers, things like DVD players, HDTV sets, digital cameras and Diamond’s Rio. They’re no longer techno-toys of dubious value, but they haven’t achieved widespread adoption, either. My experience with the Rio was mixed: the device works as advertised but, for me, only after hours of struggling with the software and surfing the Web for free music.
Setup was a snap: I booted up the CD-ROM that came in the box, installed it on my desktop PC, popped an AA battery into the portable unit and attached it to the PC with a simple cable. Then the headaches began. Twice, I had to reinstall the software–called MusicMatch JukeBox–that comes with the Rio for managing your collection of “MP3 files,” which is a technical format for making digital copies of music. After finally getting it to work, I was baffled by the software interface. There were five buttons in the main menu: “Recorder,” “Database,” “Player,” “Upgrade” and “Buy CD.” Did I want to do any of those things? I couldn’t tell. Eventually, I was sent by the software to a few good Web sites for free music, like mp3.com, a huge repository of songs in MP3 format. I downloaded a few clips, then surfed to another site that seemed the cyberspace equivalent of a basement store with illegal used records. After scrolling through hundreds of obscure song titles, I gave up looking for recognizable artists and selected a few randomly. The songs are lovely, but who are these people? I was also disappointed to find that the built-in memory holds only about 24 to 30 minutes of music tracks recorded at the highest fidelity. That’s half of most full-length albums. And why can’t the darn thing detect the additional 8MB memory card I inserted?
I had envisioned downloading talk-radio segments from National Public Radio’s Web site, converting them into MP3 files and uploading them to my Rio. Let’s just say you have to walk before you can run.
