A bit back I posted that Rio had gone belly-up. All assets had been sold to Sigmatel, and hope for anything developed by their team looked lost.

Looks like I jumped the gun.

Turns out, Sigmatel has kept Rio's development team, along with everything they'd been working on when Rio closed up shop. According to a thread on Riovolution, the whole STMP3600 reference design that was planned for the Chroma is still alive and well, and will likely be used as the foundation for other players soon. That includes the best features of the Karma (gapless …

I absolutely love my Rio Karma. It's the best portable audio unit I've ever owned. Rio chose to make a pure audio (as opposed to a half-baked PDA or video player or personal storage or whatever…) player and to do it right. I have music pretty much everywhere I go, and the Karma's pretty much the perfect gadget for me.

About a year back, Rio announced that they were doing R&D on the Karma's successor, tenatively called the Chroma. Details were sketchy, but the few things that had been left out of the Karma, like Audible …

Rio has posted a new firmware for the Karma. Mostly bugfixes, but you can check out the details here.

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

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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 …

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 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 …

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 …