Rio Pmp300 Portable Music Player

Rio PMP300 Portable Music Player

CW EVALUATION

Hop, jump and ride without a skip

NO DOUBT, RIDING TO THE RHYTHM OF your favorite band is a good way to dispel the monotony of long freeway stints. But while on-board sound systems may be standard equipment on some touring bikes, most of today’s tuned-in motorcyclists opt for earphones plugged into a portable music source.

A Walkman cassette player is one viable option, but magnetic tankbags can quickly erase audio tapes. And while portable CD players offer unmatched fidelity, they tend to skip when subjected to the jarring dynamics of motorcycling. So, what’s a motion-minded audiophile to do?

Diamond Multimedia’s Rio PMP300 Portable Music Player fills the bill. Smaller than a deck of playing cards and weighing just 2.4 ounces, the Rio delivers CD-quality digital music in an MP3 compressed-data format. Most importantly, it never, ever skips. Featuring a solid-state design, the Rio has no moving parts to be influenced by jolts. What’s more, because no electric motor is necessary for spinning a cassette or disc, more than 12 hours of playing time can be milked from a single AA battery.

While MP3 music can be downloaded directly from the Internet, the Rio also comes with the necessary software for recording personal audio CD tracks onto your PC’s hard drive in the MP3 format. Once the music is stored on the PC, compiling a list of songs to be loaded into the Rio’s memory is a drag-n-drop process-just like copying files to a floppy disk.

Setting up the Rio with a play list is a matter of plugging it into a Windows 95or 98-based PC’s parallel port with the supplied cable and port adaptor. This enables MP3 music files to be downloaded into the Rio’s 32MB of built-in flash memory.

Operating the Rio is as simple as using a traditional CD player. Like the latter, it comes with Play, Stop, Pause, Fast Forward/Rewind and Skip functions. Plus, extra commands such as Random, Repeat and Intro Play accompany four equalizer settings for tone adjustment.

DETAILS Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. 2880 Junction Ave. San Jose, CA 95134 408/325-7000 Price $199 A Smaller than a pack of smokes A Battery life that could kill the bunny's business `~owns V A PC is required to load new song files V Not available for Macs

$199

Playback time depends on the level of data compression used during the MP3 recording process. Best-case scenario is about 30 minutes of excellent sound. More time is available, but accessing too much can sacrifice music quality.

For greater storage capacity, Diamond also offers removable 16MB or 32MB flash-memory cards like those used with digital cameras and some video games. Simply slide the $100 card into the Rio, and your play list incorporates the additional songs stored on the card as well as what’s already been loaded into the machine’s on-board memory.

So, if your priority is primo sound quality, it k doesn’t matter whether your musical preference is rock, jazz or classical-the Rio can help you overcome dem ol’ superslab blues. □