Rio Karma 20Gb MP3 Player

I have to say my research was justified. It has all the features I was waiting for before I commited my hard earned money to a purchase: Reads WMA (not ipod), MP3, WAV, Ogg vorbis, FLAC - check // USB 2.0 support - check // Ethernet Port - check (excellent inclusion by the way) // Audio outs for conection to stereo system - check // Rio Taxi (transport files between computers) - check.

Add to this the excellent battery life, compact design, durability, rio dj, gapless playback (mix cd's now playable on DAP - superb), excellent sound quality (parent company is Denon), good volume levels & excllent EQ.

What can I say - bloody excellent. My player sits atop my Stereo in it's cradle, wired to my Stereo (havn't played a CD since I got it). It's got an ethernet cable which links to my PC in another room and updates automatically when I record another CD. Then when I'm out and about I simply pick up and slip in the pocket. I've been away for a week - battery still ok after possibly 15+ hours of playback.

Whatever you do, get this if you're after a DAP. And just to re-assure you this is my first review for amazon. I'm a busy person but really had to let fellow consumers know how pleased I am with this peice of hardware. SIMPLY MAGIC!!!

Before I purchased this player, I did about 6 months of Internet research and found that the Karma provided the features I was after. This highlights an important point – different players have different features and will be suitable, or not, to different people. This one was right for me.

First then, what the Rio Karma does NOT do. It does not have a radio. Nor can it record from external sources. So you cannot record voice messages – meetings, lectures etc. Neither can you encode music direct to the player. I’m not fussed about recording conversation, but want to convert my old cassettes to mp3 and thought I would like to have this feature, until I realised that starting and stopping recording at the right time can be fiddly and if you don’t get it right first time you have to try again (and again) until you do – you cannot edit the start and end of music files on any hard-disk player I found. It is so much easier to record straight to you computer – you can get free software to edit when a song starts or finishes so you just record the whole side of a cassette / record and separate the songs.

Secondly the player is not recognised as a separate hard drive. You CAN store files on the Karma, but need to use the software that comes with the player to do so. This means you need to install the software on more than one computer if you want to transfer files between them. I do not do this, so it wasn’t important to me.

The battery is not replaceable. Rio does have a very popular (and very useful) associated website (www.riovolution.com), which is even contributed to by people who work for Rio. It is a great place to go to for support and advice. It is widely quoted there that the battery will give 500 full recharge cycles at 15 hours a go before going down to about 80% capacity (12 hours) for another 500 cycles. This gives approx 13,500 hours of use. Work out how long this will last you. I reckon on 9 years at 4 hours use per day. There is also speculation that third party replacement batteries are available in Japan and on their way over here.

Finally the screen is apparently prone to scratches. I have not taken the chance and applied an LCD screen protector, using a template available from Riovolution. It is easy to do and is hardly noticeable.

If this all sounds negative then maybe the Karma isn’t for you. I have a wide range of music (2,000+ songs has used just short of 8Gb). If, like me, you are more concerned with listening to music than the features above, then I believe the Karma is the best currently available. Sound quality is superb even at high volumes, the supplied headphones are very capable and the player has excellent equaliser options. The amount of file types supported is comprehensive (mp3, wma, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis). The VU meters during playback seemed like a gimmick, but are strangely addictive to watch. If you prefer, though, you can simply view the progress bar or list of songs.

I have yet to find a portable audio player with 20Gb+ memory that has the playback features of the Rio Karma. With the Karma you can choose to listen to music by Album, Artist, Genre, Year, recently added to player, recently played, most played, least played, used to play a lot but haven’t recently, sounds of the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, and random mix lasting set duration. Additionally most of these options can be automatically generated using Rio DJ and setting your preferred parameters. More than that you can easily combine features so you could listen to all songs from two or more artists/albums/genres/years. You can also create playlists from any selection of songs you make while you are on the move – no need for your computer - and then playback in order, shuffled or repeated. Finally, you can do all this while listening to music, with no delays or jumps.

Some last good points, the Rio Music Manager software is very simple to use and does what you would expect it to (encode and transfer songs, edit id3 tags, play music etc). The interface on the Karma is also very easy to use and navigate, with some customisable features including support for both left- and right-handed people. The machine is smaller than I expected, yet I even knew the dimensions (approx 75mm x 78mm x 25mm) and saw pictures comparing to, say, cigarette packets and the iPod before I bought it.

In conclusion, I wholeheartedly recommend this player. It does not attempt to be jack-of-all trades and therefore succeeds in its main aim and purpose – to store a vast amount of music and playback with quality. I know this is a long review, but I found such reviews hard to find and did not want to spend nearly £300 on something that was not right for me. I hope this is useful and helps you out.