Mp3 players?

[theraidenproject]

i have the first rio volt. it is great, except for three flaws: 1.) about 30 seconds loading time at the start-up (it doesn't sound that bad, but it gets annoying if you just want to listen to one song really quickly) 2.) skip protection (it's two minutes, but in the first 20 seconds it takes to store that 2 minutes into memory, it skips even at a slow walk, after that, it's impossibile to make it skip. in fact, the disc even stops spinning) 3.)burning the cd (it can only read it if its written at a slow speed, under 5x write speed is recommended iirc)
other than that, it is great. i HIGHLY reccomend it. best thing i've ever bought (i haven't bought a mag yet) get the black one with 8 min skip protection, and the fm radio.
whew...sorry for the long post

[bornl33t]

wow, I must not have the first one... mine takes no more then 10seconds to spin up, read the CD and start playing. Granted 10 sec is a long time...specially for just ONE song. Mine rarly skips, infact unless I'm running I don;t even turn on the antiskip to safe batteries which last forever anyway. I usually run out of batteries before I run out of music. At the time I got a great deal on a HP cd burner that burns up to 10X. Even though CD's can only be writen to at 8X. But I've never had a problem with it reading CD writen at that speed. But the more tiney scratches it get the worse the CD gets....

MY brother just bought the Black/red one for his birthday... it's also a great player! Funny thing is... the 8 min skip is just nuts.....

[MagMan5446]

I own a Nomad Jukebox. 20 gigabytes of mp3 glory.

[irbodden]

There is a 30 second load up for EVERY song? EEK, I might have to get one of the better ones.

[PyRo]

MP3 cd players look pretty cool, i was going to buy one a while ago, but blew the money on a day of paintball. Anyone want to get me a christmass gift

[theraidenproject]

"There is a 30 second load up for EVERY song? EEK, I might have to get one of the better ones."
-let me clarify. its only about 30 seconds when you FIRST TURN THE CD PLAYER ON. what a meant about the one song example was, if you just wanted your friend to listen to one specific song, as opposed to listening to it for a one hour bus ride, the 30 second load in the beginning is annoying. i love it, im just nitpicking. i'm pretty sure I have the first model with the first software. im sure a couple of these issues have been addressed with recent software updates. (to upgrade software, you just burn the software from riohome.com onto a cd-r, put in the rio volt, and it is updated), but I haven't updated yet. sorry for the confusion.

[rifleman]

[bornl33t]

outpost.com great buys on all elektronics...
used to have free shipping, then decited to start a little side income... hehee

It reads the ID tags. and list them as such... once you start the player you can either scroll through the whole CCD by pressing < > . However if you want to have access beyond scrolling you'll but you're Mp3's in directorys. Then if you're into DMB then you'll just hit the directory button and scroll up and down to you're directory and then find the one song out of 10 instead of looking through 200 to find you're song. If you tag all you're Mp3's with songname - artist I've found it helps when scrolling. The screeen only displays estimated 10-12 letters/digits. and then cuts them off. However when you're scrolling through and pause on a song, the tag will start to autoscroll right to left so you can view the entire tag. This means you'll have to pause at every song if the artist names are first and long.

I like the fact that the screen is backlit. as soon as you hit any button the backlite comes on and goes off within another 5 sec.

They really put alot of though into the RIO. It's not cheaply made but it's still light. The screen is realativly hard to scratch, the buttons are fairly ergonomicly placed along with some designer look they create. All around it's a great thing every "true music lover" should have. The Rio volts I've seen all come with a car kit, PERFECT to replace that old worn out portable CD player.

Also check out www.kangaru.com. These guys pioneer the portable mp3 screen, with stuff like removable hard drives with headphone jacks.... etc.

[Jeb_Hoge]

For solid-state (no discs or drives), there's a Samsung Yepp model I saw that was nice...came with 64MB onboard and expansion slots, and those memory cards are crash-diving in price. There's also the miniYepp, a $100 32MB player the size of a Cadbury Creme Egg, but it can't store much music.

Other than that, I like the Rios and the 20GB Nomads.

[theraidenproject]

o yea...i timed the loading today, 25 seconds, not 30. My estimate was close. also, i have model psx100 (it says that on the back, although on the website says the model is the sp100). I forgot to add, the remote and headphones that came with mine were great, but the wire coating on the headphones wore out and i had to put new electric tape on it every day. The remote is great, but the plug got bent, and you could only here music from one position, and it would turn the cd player off. no problem w/ the ri0, i changed headpgones and it worked fine. heres some more info on the rio volts and other mp3cds...
sp250 http://www.riohome.com/products/riovolt_sp250.htm (get this one, its $155 according to cnet price compare)
sp90 http://www.riohome.com/products/riovolt_sp90.htm
sp100 http://www.riohome.com/products/riovolt.htm
TDK mojo http://tdk.com/mojo/index.html
sp250 review http://www.cnet.com/electronics/0-63...4-6913666.html
sp100 review http://www.cnet.com/electronics/0-63...4-4622445.html
sp90 review http://www.cnet.com/electronics/0-63...4-6913665.html
tdk mojo review http://www.cnet.com/electronics/0-63...0-1304-5603188

about the navigation...its pretty good. press directory and use the play, stop, ff and rv buttons for nav. you can organise to as many folders as you like, by album ,artists, whatever. ex... i have every led zep studio album plus bbc sessions organized by album. i also have some hard rock stuff i ripped from a friend, but i didnt organize into folders, i just did the whole thing alphabetical. the only problem with alphabetical is if you want to preserve the orignal order of something, for ex. pink floyd albums. you could put the track # in front of the song title, then organize by album. but, i wish you could just oprganize by dragging songs in order. (im talking about adaptec cd creator, if anyone has other burning software that lets you burn in your own order, please let me know). hope this helps someone.

[Ityl]

I bought my rio volt for $200 with tax and $20 warrantee when they first came out.

Bad things:

1. I don't like the headphones
2. doesn't have really loud output (not a really big deal though)
3. wierd ac jack, car plug I tried wouldn't fit
4. more than a regular cd player
5. battery life is less than new cd players that get 32 hours

Good things

1. lots of songs on one CD
2. plays regular cds
3. plays cdrw's
4. priced reasonable, more sensible than buying the mp3 players that don't play cd's
5. cd's are cheap to make
6. remote thingy is cool
7. upgradable software
8. mp3's are quick to load so excellent anti skip (120 sec)

I love mine, glad I payed a lil more and got something that totally rocks.

[Cliffio]

i kinda thought that they were alot of hype, and i still havent actually seen one in real life

i dunno

[bornl33t]

I HATE the rio headphones. I grew up with headphones in my ears... I've litterally wasted over 30 set since I started back in the early '90s. At one point I though of patching headphones together to keep the cost down. The rio headphones are not capable of "loud" for whatever reason. They are not designed very ergonomically and are poor with multiple great variances in sound pitch. For example, it can play a very low sound and a high sound at the same time. It will equalize the two it comes through distorted. Get a set of Sony headphones. They always last the longest and are crystal clear. Best bang for the buck!

[theraidenproject]

yea ive always loved sony headphones. ive had 2 pairs of the earbud ones with the headband. right now, im using my dad's sony "street" behind the neck headphones. I like them, but theyre a little bulky, other people hear what yoour listening to too easily, and they can hurt your ears after a while. im getting a new pair for christmas, probably sony earbuds. 1.) because they sound good 2.)theyre small 3.)i have to keep them in my pocket during class so some of my teachers wont yell at me (they dont understand that headphones need to be IN your ears to listen to them well)

[rifleman]

Well, I've decided folks--The VC Soul Player, everything that expensive rio thing has only cheaper!