Rio Karma

9 posts
Audio Technology

RMMLite

3 comments

Last night, I decided to upgrade Ubuntu to 11.4.  Long story short, that was a mistake.  An hour of back-tracking later, I had re-installed 10.4.  I plan on sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

11.4 is buggy, to put it mildly.  There’s some conflict with the drivers for my Nvidia card, and the system locked hard several times.  I once enjoyed hand-configuring Slackware installations by hand, but my zeal for that faded years ago.

The Unity interface is laggy, cluttered, and counter-intuitive.  While I can understand why some might find the Gnome interface to be bland and utilitarian, the OSX-looking dock on the left side just eats valuable screen real estate.  Frankly, I can’t tell what its exact purpose is.  In some ways, it acts like WindowMaker’s dock, but it also serves as a redundant menu.

Speaking of menus, the original Gnome panel is also there, but most of its functionality has been removed. 

Continued...

Audio Technology

Rumors of Rio’s demise possibly premature.

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 playback, wide format compatibility, parametric EQ), plus MSC compliance and several others.

How long before we see it in a consumer-level product is anyone’s guess. Austin Vaughan was at CES a few days back, and Ralph Fiennes (Rio’s primary Karma developer) gave an interview, in which we get this:

We got a product demonstation of Sigmatel’s reference design for a player that’s just like the Rio Avalon – an 8gb MicroDrive based player which has the same body style as the Rio Carbon but has a color screen and all the features of the Rio Karma.

Continued...

Audio Technology

Rio is dead. Long live Rio.

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 support and MSC compliance, would be part of the Chroma, as well as a larger hard-drive and a color interface. Basically, it was to be the Holy Grail for audiophiles, and the community waited with bated breath for details.

Well, it turns out that’s not gonna happen, pilgrims. Rio has closed their doors and sold assets off to Sigmatel.

Continued...

Audio Technology

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.

Continued...
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.

Continued...

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.

Continued...

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.

Continued...

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.

Continued...