My first foray into the world of portable MP3 has been with this little device, and I have to say I’m impressed.
The unit itself is small and stylish – curvy, a little smaller than a cassette and about 1.5 times thicker.
Using the Rio is a breeze. At the top of the unit is an on/off switch, and the rest is controlled from the front panel with obvious controls such as volume, play, pause back and forward. The menu option takes you to a screen that allows you to customise the Equalisation, with preset options for ’Normal’, ’Jazz’, ’Classic’, ’Rock’, etc, plus a ’Custom’ option for your own settings. You can delete songs from the device, plus set track repeat and random play options. Other options include control of the backlight, and time/day settings.
The display is informative, giving you information on track title and artist, duration, elapsed time, sample rate, track number and volume setting.
The PC software is pretty good, scanning your hard drive for suitable media files (although it does find files that the Rio can’t play, such as Real Audio). Copying selected tracks to a playlist for upload to the Rio is fairly straightforward, and the speed of transfer via USB is quite impressive. Thanks to ’Madal’ for pointing out that Windows 98 is a minimum requirement for the PC software. Mac software is also available
Powered by one AA battery, the Rio 600 has 32Meg of onboard RAM, and is expandable to 372 MB. It plays MP3 and WMA formats, and comes with comfortable earphones, USB cable, case and software.
All in all, a good sound, with a good range of features in a nice size. A good buy!