The Rio 500 MP3 player from Diamond Multimedia is their second of such MP3 players. This time round they have updated their product with a new set of features and functionality.

This time round Diamond has abandoned the boring old black color ID (industrial design) and has come up with an ID that has the color scheme similar to that of the wildly successful iMac. It seems that nowadays quite a number of products have jumped on that bandwagon to make their products stand out from the crowd trying to make it more appealing to the iMac fans. The Rio 500 is no exception. It is designed to appeal to the iMac crowd since the first generation Rio was not designed for Macintosh or iMac users in mind. This time round they have chosen not to ignore the iMac fans and have included support for iMacs, iBooks and G4s in the form of a USB port. The Rio is also probably the first MP3 product to boast Macintosh compatibility. The Rio 500 uses USB to transfer MP3 files from your PC. This is a good thing since the USB is much quicker and easier to use than the parallel port. One does not need to fiddle and figure out conflicts associated with the parallel port. Compared to some other portable MP3 which uses the parallel port to transfer music files from your PC, the USB on the Rio 500 certainly beats them hands down. USB is the way to go !

Since the Rio 500 is an audio device, audio quality is a very subjective matter. I will not attempt to delve into that here but instead I will review the usability and other areas of interest to the user. The only thing I can mention about the audio is the clarity and the quality of the headphones supplied. I did not encountered any problems with freezes or hangs on the unit. The audio sounded clean without any hint of noise or distortion that I can make out. The headphones included in the package was supplied by Koss. All I can say is that the quality is not what I expected but then again what can one expect from in-ear headphones. The headphones also has this awkward ear hooks built-in making it difficult to wear. It may also be ill fitting and uncomfortable for some users. I wonder why Diamond chose to bundle with this particular set of headphones. I would certainly recommend investing in a good pair of headphones for the Rio 500. It will certainly do the Rio 500 justice. In my tests, I use the Sennheiser HD575. It was a little difficult for the Rio 500 to drive and was only loud enough at full volume. Not a good idea and certainly doesn't do well for battery life.

Software installation is easy and includes the necessary USB driver that you need to operate the Rio 500. Plugging the Rio 500 into your PC for the first time will launch the hardware wizard which prompts you for the driver location to install from. Once the software installed, the next step is a breeze.

The software supplied is called the RioPort Manager which allows the user to download music from the PC to the Rio 500. It also helps to organize the music that you have on your hard disk. RioPort Manager also features the ability to search for music that you have placed anywhere on your hard disk. This helps to search for those soundtracks that you may have downloaded from places like MP3.com and have left them forgotten somewhere on your hard disk. In addition to music that you may already have in MP3 format, you can also encode music that you already have on your music CDs. RioPort Manager will "copy" the music directly from your music CD to the Rio 500. The copy process actually encodes the music from your CD directly to your Rio 500 transparently so you do not have to worry about having any intermediate files. This is quite cool but if you do download music from your CDs frequently, it may be quite troublesome to search for that CD everytime you want to load music into the Rio 500. Of course, if you can afford it you could splurge on a few SmartMedia memory cards and have a few of your compilations on hand. You can also get the RioPort Manager to search for soundtracks that you can download from the RioPort website once you are connected to the internet. RioPort Manager allows the user to organize your favourite music into playlists which you can also review on your PC before you decide to load them into your Rio 500. You can also organize your music into folders on the Rio 500 using the RioPort Manager. This certainly helps to distinguish tracks from different albums or artists. Unlike some of the other players on the market, the Rio 500 only allows a single way transfer from the PC to the device.

The Rio 500 itself looks like a pretty nifty device with a dot matrix LCD screen with EL (electro-luminescence) backlight built-in just like those Casio Illuminator watches. The unit that I have comes in that iMac Blueberry lookalike color although it is available in 2 other colors, translucent purple and metallic gray. Since it is translucent, you can actually see thru the skin to see the electronic components and the battery inside the unit. The unit has a few simple buttons like playback controls, a browse button, a bookmark button, a thumbwheel volume control and a switch. The switch allows you to turn the unit on or off and also has a hold position to lock the playback buttons and the volume control. The browse button allows you to browse the music that you may have organized into folders in the Rio 500 while the volume thumbwheel doubles as a scroll wheel when you use the browse button so that you can scroll around the playlist to search for your favourite tune. The volume thumbwheel also has a switch built-in much like the thumbwheel in those wheel mouse on your PC. The switch is used as a select switch when you are in the browse mode. The volume level has quite a wide range going all the way to 20. This gives the user greater volume level resolution and better volume control for a wider range of headphone impedance. The EL backlight comes on whenever any of the buttons are pressed. This comes in quite handy if you frequently listen to music in the dark since the backlight is hardly visible in the light. Pressing the volume button by itself reveals a range of hidden functions which includes the ability to setup a program list, preset eq functions as well as customizable setting for bass and treble.

The Rio 500 runs on a single AA battery which allows up to 13 hours of playback, according to Diamond. This estimation is based on playback time only. Downloading of files into the player will surely drain quite a bit of the juice from the battery since the USB signals require 5V to operate.

The package that I received includes one AA battery, one custom USB cable, a pair of headphones, a mesh/net style belt clip-on type case (which is neither stylish or protective) and a CD which contains software for both PC and Mac versions. Unfortunately I currently do not have an iMac to try out the Mac software with. Maybe I'll write another review for all you Mac fans out there when I get one later ;-) Additional SmartMedia memory cards would be useful and current SmartMedia cards have capacities of 16MB or 32MB although Diamond claims that the Rio 500 supports higher densities.

The Rio 500 seems to have a good set of features and functionalities that one can expect from a portable MP3 player. Best of all, it is the only player in the market today that supports the Macintosh. For the price that the Rio 500 commands, it isn't too bad although I still think that it is a little on the expensive side. Besides, the media is also pretty expensive and it doesn't really buy you that much music time. For example, 64MB buys you about 60 minutes of music depending on the bit rate and sample rate of the music that you have chosen to encode. Currently the RioPort Manager software does not support MetaTrust and Audible yet but support will be provided as free upgrades when available. Once that is available the purchase of music over the net will be possible.

For those of you with the money to splurge or have a birthday coming up, the Rio 500 is a pretty cool toy to have.

Thanks goes to Marketplace for sponsoring the product for review.