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Pioneers of MP3 portables
Sunday, March 12, 2000 By Tracy Collins, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
One truism of MP3 is that while it's incredibly inexpensive to turn your computer into a stereo, it's relatively expensive to purchase other devices on which to play these compact pieces of music.
Pioneering the MP3 portables is Diamond Multimedia, maker of the remarkable Rio. At a tiny 2.5 inches wide by 3.5-inches tall -- and less than an inch thick -- it fits comfortably in a shirt pocket and has no moving parts, which means no skipping CDs and no fluttering cassette tapes. It runs on one AA, which gives you about 10 hours of continuous play. It comes in two levels of capacity -- the Rio 300 ($129) has 32mb of memory, which holds about 40 minutes of music, and the Rio 500 ($270), which has 64mb of memory. Each player can also use 32mb flash cards, which are matchbook-sized discs that can store extra MP3s.
Others have followed Diamond into the MP3 market, most notably Creative Labs, whose Nomad player ($200) also can act as a tape recorder with voice input, and RCA, which offers one of the lowest-priced, high-capacity MP3 players with its Lyra ($175). Sony makes its VAIO Music Clip ($300), which looks like a large ink pen but can store 64mb of music files, or about two hours of music, either in MP3 or Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 files.
If you don't mind carrying a player about the size of a portable CD player, Remote Solution offers the amazing -- but pricey -- Personal Jukebox PJB-100 ($799). It has a whopping 4 gigabytes of memory, which means you can hold about 1,200 songs in this portable jukebox.
While no major stereo manufacturer is offering an MP3 player as a component -- many are considering it but are waiting for the legal waters to clear -- there are MP3 components that can be plugged into your high-end stereo system. Request Inc.'s AudioRequest ($800) will store 300 hours of MP3 to play on your stereo -- that's about 6,000 songs.
Remember, if you're playing MP3 on a high-end system, you'll need to record them at a higher output, which means that your single MP3 CD will hold only about 100 songs and seven hours of music -- still enough to get you through most parties.
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