eighing just 4.4 ounces with its stereo earphones and AA battery, the Rio PMP300 is a force to be reckoned with. Small enough to fit comfortably in your hand, the Rio looks like a Walkman. But instead of using a cassette tape, the Rio has a computer chip. It plays digital music that you can record yourself or download over the Internet.
The Rio is the first piece of consumer electronics equipment to play music compressed with the MP3 system. Over the last six months MP3 has become a recording industry phenomenon. There are literally thousands of computers on the Internet that are filled with pirate copies of MP3-encoded songs - most of them in college dorm rooms.
Yet at the same time several legitimate Web sites are selling licensed MP3 songs - goodnoise.com sells singles for 99 cents a track - with royalties going to the artists. And many bands have realized that giving music away on the Internet is a good way to promote concerts.
MP3 players terrify the recording industry. That's because once you download an MP3 file, there's nothing that prevents you from e-mailing the song to a friend. Unlike cassette tapes, computers make perfect digital copies of MP3 files. And each MP3 file is untraceable: There is no way to tell who was responsible for the original copyright violation (if there was one in the first place).
The Rio lets you take MP3 songs, put them in your pocket, and listen to them wherever. The Rio connects to your computer through the parallel port and comes with a cable, earphones, and even a AA battery, which reportedly lasts 14 hours. The unit comes with 32 megabytes of memory, enough to hold six or 12 songs, depending on whether the MP3s are compressed to allegedly CD quality or near-CD quality.
There's also a slot on the bottom that lets you expand the Rio's memory using standard compact flash cards, the kind that are getting popular on digital cameras. Diamond sells a 16-megabyte, 3.3-volt memory card for $49.95; you can find 48-megabyte cards on the Net for about $200, and they should work with the device. Given trends, these prices will go down.
What I find most disappointing about the Rio is not what it does, but what it doesn't do. It would have been really neat if the unit displayed the name of the song being played, rather than just the track number and the number of seconds into the song. I wish the fast-forward and rewind features let you hear the music as it drifted by.
As far as portable music machines go, in fact, the Rio is pretty average. Since it's solid-state, it can't skip. The Rio lets you go forward or backward in the play list or play songs randomly. It has an intro mode that plays the first 10 seconds of each song. It has volume buttons and four equalizer settings: jazz, rock, classical, and normal. To record, you must use your desktop or laptop computer and then download the music into the device.
Overall, this doesn't compare favorably with my new Sony MiniDisc Walkman. It weighs 7 ounces; it doesn't skip, either; and holds 74 minutes of music. Perhaps more important, I can record with it. While the MiniDisc costs about $100 more than the Rio, you can buy MiniDiscs for $5 apiece - much cheaper than a memory card. And you can still download MP3s from the Internet. You just have to take the extra step of recording them yourself onto disc.
The Rio comes with two programs that run on Windows 95 (sorry Macintosh fans). The first is the Rio control program, which lets you download MP3 files into the system. The second is Music Match, which lets you take tracks off your own CDs and turn them into MP3 files - a process that's called ripping.
The word is derived from Raster Image Processors, which are used in the computer graphics industry. A RIP is a program that converts images in one form, usually PostScript, to another form that can be printed on a high-quality printer. MusicMatch is a legitimate program that lets US citizens exercise their rights under the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act to make home recordings of their own music.
But that's not the way that the Recording Industry Association of America sees it. The RIAA, a trade group that represents record companies, sees Rio and MusicMatch as one of the biggest threats to profits since, well, the cassette tape.
In October, the association filed suit and was granted a restraining order in federal court to halt the sale and distribution of the Rio PMP300. That injunction was quickly overturned. The court ruled that since the Rio was incapable of recording, and since there was no way to get the music out of the device, it didn't violate the recording act. MusicMatch, meanwhile, doesn't fall under the recording act's purview because the law exempts computers and computer peripherals.
Although the lawsuit against the Rio is continuing, the case may be moot. On Tuesday, Diamond Multimedia announced it would be joining an RIAA coalition that will develop a standard for bringing security to digitally recorded music.
Seeking to keep itself as a middleman between the bands and the fans, the industry wants the best of both worlds: having a system that lets fans download music over the Internet but prevents them from sharing the music, or even making a second copy for themselves. Such systems exist in the laboratory.
But copy protection is ultimately a lost cause. At the very least, people will always be able to hook up their MiniDisc recorders to their computers and record the music that comes out of the speakers. That's why the recording industry should stop dreaming up ways to kill devices like Rio, and start trying to figure out how to embrace this new technology. Time is running out.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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