A Riot in Your Pocket

By
iApplianceWeb
(01/09/02, 09:54:35 AM EDT)

SONICblue has unveiled its first hard drive-based portable music player -- the Rio Riot. Designed to store an entire music collection, the Rio Riot is built around a 20GB hard drive that holds more than 5,000 songs or 400 CDs worth of high-quality digital music.

Making music accessible and easy to manage, the Rio Riot integrates SONICblue's newly developed Rio LogicTrack user interface, which includes an ergonomic scroll wheel, one-touch buttons, a visual-menu system, a large 240 x 160 backlit display, and a sleek, ergonomic design. The Rio Riot also includes an integrated FM tuner, long-life rechargeable batteries, and new music management software from MoodLogic.

Key features of the Rio Riot include:

• The Rio DJ playlist creator generates custom playlists of new music, songs by year or decade, and favorites.
  
• The integrated FM tuner with presets allows users to search out new music and stay current with what's being played over the airwaves.
  
• A rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery delivers more than 10 hours worth of playback for long-lasting music on the go.
  
• Bundled MoodLogic personal music management software cleans up ID3 tag information, generates and shares one-click playlists based on music tastes, auto classifies music, and recommends songs.
  
• A 16 MB SDRAM Buffer stores music in the memory and stops the hard drive from spinning during playback, delivering up to 12 minutes of electronic skip protection, while also saving battery life and speeding up navigation.
  
• Bundled RealJukebox and iTunes music management software plays and organizes music.
  
• MP3 and WMA playback lets you listen to the most common file formats and is upgradeable to other emerging digital standards through software releases. SONICblue also plans to add support for the Audible spoken audio content service into the Rio Riot in a future release.

The Rio Riot ($399.95 MSRP) is available for preorder at SONICblue's eStore and will be available toward the end of February in North American retail outlets.

Link:
SONICblue