March 2004 – LonelyMachines

Rio Karma Review, Addendum: Underground Lair of the Karma

Talked to one of the Rio engineers and got a few corrections and additions to the technical data.

– The CPU is the 5003, not the 5002. The 5003 has a better cache architecture and some other improvements (and an ethernet MAC onboard).

– USB onboard the 5003 is not used, as this is USB1, 12MBit. There’s a Cypress controller doing the USB2 480Mbit.

– The RAM usage is actually more buffer than workspace/code/fonts/etc. We don’t use the Hitachi’s APM features, we just turn it off – the APM stuff isn’t low power enough. I’m not aware of any HDD jukebox which relies on the HDD sleep modes, as they’re not (yet) zero power on any HDD. The RAM is low power Micron mobile SDRAM.

– The onboard database isn’t much like the empeg-car’s one, nor like the Rio Central database that came after it. It’s a DB specially optimised for the Karma’s needs.

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Audio Technology

Rio Karma Review, Pt IV: Secret Order of the Karma

Rio hasn’t published any detailed specs for the Karma beyond the usual product-sheet stuff, so I’ve gathered what backend information I could find about its inner workings. A big thanks to Dave Marsh and everyone over at Riovolution for digging this stuff up.

The CPU is from a company called PortalPlayer. It’s a neat jack-of-all trades chip specifically designed for portable media devices, series PP5002. It’s got two 90Mhz ARM7 RISC processors running symmetrically in 32-bit. One controls the decoding and signal output, while the other handles the interface (buttons, LCD) and hard-drive. It also provides the UltraDMA66 bus and ethernet/USB functions.

The actual buffer memory is only 16MB. It’s been stated that most of that is taken up by fonts and firmware, so the Karma must be making good use of the Hitachi’s APM capabilities to buffer so well and still preserve battery life.

The onboard OS is ECOS, which is a *nix-ish (POSIX-compliant) system for embedded devices.

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Audio Technology

Rio Karma Review, Pt III: Night of the Living Karma

As far as navigation, this thing is in a class of its own. All files transferred to the Karma need to have tidy ID3 tags, because that’s how everything’s organized. The onboard database allows for browsing and selection by Artist, Genre, Year, and Album, and there’s a neat feature called ‘Rio DJ’, which allows the user to specify certain paramaters, such as most-frequently played tracks or oldest tracks, then creates a dynamic playlist from them. Playlists can be created and edited on the fly, and files can be deleted directly from the player. It’s a credit to the efficiency of the programming that all this can be done while a song is playing, and the player won’t hitch for a second.

In fact, everything from the software perspective is seamless. Once you get used to using the joystick and scrollwheel, they become second nature. The controls are solid, and they respond more quickly than any player I’ve ever used.

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Audio Technology

Rio Karma Review, Pt. II: Son of Karma

The menu and database systems are excellent, and as I’d later learn, they’re a product of engineers who really seem to be proud of their work. It shows. Unlike the iRiver, the Karma doesn’t show up as an MSC device. It has to be accessed through an intermediary software layer, much like Creative players. I used to deplore this approach, but after seeing the alternative, I’ve got to say that this is better. However, where Creative drops the ball with horrendous (read: MusicMatch) software, and Windows-only compatibility, the folks at Rio have thought this one through a little better.

The Karma ships with a Windows-only software suite called Rio Music Manager (RMM). I booted into Windows to give it a spin, and it’s actually a pretty good setup. However, one of my conditions for buying a player is that I not have to do that, and that’s where RMMLite comes in.

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Audio Technology

iRiver is dead, long live the Karma

When my old NJB3 died, I realized just what a gap I had in my life without one of these little gizmos. If you’ve read anything on this site, you know what a geek I am for music. I ran a record store for several years, and I’ve been in and around the industry for about 15 years. I’ve been exposed to so much over that time, that I’ve got the Alexandrian Library of Pop music in my head, and almost as much in my closet.

When I was a kid, the Walkman was the greatest invention since movable type. The idea of being able to carry around music and shut out the outside world for it was something immensely gratifying and liberating. There’s been much said lately about the “iPod effect,” but really, it’s just a successor to a mentality fostered by the old handheld tape deck. It’s nice that the iPod’s popularity makes me look like a little less of a dork walking down the street with a pair of headphones over my ears, but hey, I’ve been doing that for years.

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Code

Possible IE CSS fix

Well, Internet Explorer went live within the last few days. Apparently, the biggest new feature is pop-up blocking (like Mozilla had two years ago). From what I’ve gathered, CSS is still broken to some extent, though.

Sigh.

These standards came out in what, 1998? Yep.

In any case, Dean Edwards has come out with something of a patch to help things. It’s more of a kluge than a fix of any sort, but it’s quite impressive, especially considering that they guy doesn’t even work for Microsoft. His site’s been down since notice was posted on Slashdot this morning, but I managed to look at the source, and it consists of a nifty stylesheet which relies on DHTML calls to break up commands into IE-parsable versions. The fixes mostly apply to namespaces and the multiple class-name bug, but alas, positioning is still just as wonky, so it won’t help this site.

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Audio Technology

iRiver updates

It’s been almost three months without a firmware update, with no new one in sight. The only update since January has been a Korean firmware update (1.40 K), which doesn’t add anything useful, though some users claim a slight improvement in sound quality.iRiver has responded to email from a forum user stating that the recording features were only ever intended for voice and casual recording uses, and that they are unlikely to improve. Add this to the fact that iRiver is now introducing subsequent models, it seems unlikely that ihp-120 and 140 owners will see any real improvement in functionality.