Rio Carbon MP3 Player Controls

Rio Carbon MP3 Player Review

I have owned 3 MP3 players in the past, and have been patiently waiting for a great compact, high capacity hard drive based MP3 player. As of today, the 3 primary contenders I see are the Apple iPod Mini, the Rio Carbon, and the Creative Zen Micro. I considered all three - they are all extremely compact, have a large amount of storage (4GB to 5GB), are around the same price ($249 at this time) and have their own unique features. In the end, I chose the Rio Carbon, and what follows is my review of it. The overriding factors that caused me to choose it were its larger 5GB hard drive (compared to the iPod Mini's 4GB), its voice recorder (the iPod mini has none, though the Zen Micro does), the user interface (more on this later), and the outstanding battery life (rated by the manufacturer at 20 hours). Rio Carbon MP3 Player

Rio Carbon Main Features

The main features of the Rio Caron MP3 Player are:
  • 5GB Hard Drive
  • Compact size (2.5" x 3.3" x 0.6") and light weight (3.2 ounces).
  • 1.25" backlit display, makes the player usable in dark conditions. Plus, the buttons in front also light up, making it easy to use at night.
  • Voice recorder, records WAV files at 32kbits/second.
  • Plays MP3, WMA, and Audible files.
  • Data storage device (acts as a portable hard drive for your data files).
  • Supports playlists, as well as playing all tracks, or playing by category, such as Artist, Album, Genre, Track, Year.
The design and construction of the unit is excellent. It feels quite solid and well-constructed, and fits nicely in my hand. They did an excellent job here, paying close attention to detail. There is a small rubber grip ring around the edge of the unit that feels nice to grip. Touching any of the controls lights up the backlit display and the control buttons, and if you stop using the controls, the lighting fades gradually after a few seconds to let you know it's about to go dim. A battery indicator lets you know the status of the battery level.

The controls are simple: There's a 4-button control ring in front with a select button in the center, there's a clickable scroll wheel in the upper right hand corner, and there's a main menu button in the upper right side. I found the user interface hardware and control layout to be excellent. It is easy to use the most common features such as changing the volume, pausing, skipping to the next or previous track, and fast forwarding or rewinding, even without looking at the controls. The menuing system navigation is easy to use, though some parts could use improvement. One thing I found nice is when you turn off the Rio Carbon, it remembers exactly where you left off. This is particularly important if you listen to long audio programs such as audio books.

Rio Carbon MP3 Player Earbuds The Rio Carbon comes with small earbud headphones. Usually I dislike these kinds of headphones, but, in this case, the ones that came with the Rio Carbon actually sound pretty good, and are fairly comfortable in my ears. The Rio Carbon's sound quality is excellent.

Portable Hard Drive

One of the primary reasons I wanted an MP3 player with a lot of storage is to hold data files. The Rio Carbon works quite well for this purpose- on my Windows machine, it shows up as a removable hard drive, and it is easy to create folders and drag and drop files or folders to and from the Rio Carbon.

Shortcomings

The Rio Carbon comes so close to being the perfect compact hard drive MP3 player. There are just a few things that would make it perfect.
  • First, the only major feature it's missing (which is supported by the Creative Zen Micro, but not the iPod Mini) is an FM radio and FM radio recording.
  • If you use headphones with a metal connector base, there can be static because it touches the Rio Carbon's metallic body. Although there are simple work-arounds, such as adding a bit of insulating tape, they should have caught this problem.
  • Other reviewers have reported that it has problems playing lossless WMA files. This is typically not an issue, because hardly anyone uses lossless encoding due to the extreme space overhead.
  • It comes with a nice leather carrying case, however, there should be a flap that opens to let you access its front panel controls. Also, the case doesn't have any way to be attached to a belt or armband. A simple solution take by one individual was to cut holes into the leather case.
  • The hard drive is slightly audible when it is spinning (this is likely the same case for all hard-drive based MP3 players). You won't hear it in most situations, but in a very quiet room, you can, and anyways, if you're listening to music, that will likely drown it out. Fortunately, it doesn't spin up very much, about once every 5 songs for 10 seconds.
  • The microphone is located on the body of the Rio Carbon. And, unfortunately, it picks up the noise of the spinning hard drive when recording, making it almost useless as a voice recorder.

Conclusion

The Rio Carbon is a nearly perfect MP3 player. The great user interface, excellent feature set, outstanding battery life, and compact size make for a fantastic package. If you don't use voice recording and don't mind the lack of an FM radio and recorder, this unit will make you very happy.

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