Rio Karma User Review

FuzzyBad-Mofo writes "On 8/24/2004, I took the plunge and bought a Rio Karma digital music player. My needs were simple: Decent storage capacity, Linux friendly, and Ogg Vorbis compatible. The Karma has a generous 20 GB capacity, decent battery life, is OS-agnostic, and plays a wide variety of file formats, including Ogg." Read on for the rest of FuzzyBad-Mofo's review.

Despite living in an urban area, I had a little trouble tracking down a retailer with the Karma in stock. Best Buy was sold out, but Circuit City had them (for full price, boo hiss). I was impressed with the solid feel of the device, and promptly started setting it up. Since I currently only have Linux machines at home, the included software was useless. Fortunately, the Karma also includes Ethernet connectivity through the docking cradle. In minutes the cradle was connected to my Linksys router and a static IP assigned using the Karma's joystick interface (not fun).

Once this was done, I connected via web browser to the Karma's IP address and was greeted with a nice splash page, and a couple of links to download the Java-based transfer software and to visit Rio's Karma page. I initially had trouble with the transfer software, but eventually found the developer's site on the internet; he has improved the software greatly from the version that ships with the Karma.

The docking cradle also has stereo line-level RCA ports, which is nice for integration with a home stereo. I ended up buying a 20' CAT-5 cable to give my Karma a permanent home next to the stereo. It's pretty wonderful to select 4 hours of random music for the evening, and not have to worry about changing CDs. Later, I also bought an RF adapter for use in the car, which works by broadcasting on an FM frequency you simply tune into.

The Karma is not bad to walk around with either. It is a little bulky, and I would prefer a narrower body, but it fits ok in a loose-fitting pants or jacket pocket. As with any hard-drive based player, jogging/running/biking with it is probably not a good idea.

Lockups: the Karma has taken a lot of flak for locking up, and I can't say that it's not justified. The player has locked once when I was loading music on it, in which case I simply reset with a bent paper clip and it was good to go. However, several days ago I was walking with it, attempted to change songs midstride, and it locked hard. Since I was on my way to work with no paperclip in sight (and the unit won't turn off when it locks up), the hard drive spun and seeked for 40 minutes until I got in the office. At that point, the unit was warm to the touch and had drained half the battery. After reset, the unit would not power up properly. Going into rescue mode showed that it was having trouble reading the disk. (crap!) After reading some message boards where others have experienced similar problems, I decided that I had little to lose and smacked it flat down on the desk. The Karma made a little grinding noise and booted up! It has worked perfectly since then, but I'm somewhat concerned about my purchase. Rio only offers a three-month warranty by default, so I would recommend going with an extended warranty if you decide to purchase a Karma.

Scary lockups aside, this has been a great little player. I believe it is Rio's first HDD-based player, and I'm looking forward to seeing future revisions of the Karma.

---

Thanks to FuzzyBad-MoFo for the review!

Does not inspire confidence

After reading the review I don't know that I want one of these. The reviewer discusses the negatives: size, lockups, ect. but does not really go into the upside of owning one of these.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

But it plays OGG, man! OGG!

Re:Does not inspire confidence

Having owned one of these devices since last christmas, let me offer my own two cents:

The battery life is awesome. I get an easy 12 hours of run time out of my karma between charges.

The built-in DJ funtion is unparalled. The ability to generate random playlists, or playlists based upon id3 criteria (such as decade, genre), playlists based on most listened to, least listened to, not recently listened to, etc.. all from the player itself just blows away all the competition.

The network integration is a nice feature, which the OP does mention. I also think that having lite-yet-fully-function java version of the software built into the player is a great and useful add on (simply browse to the ip and you can download the software right from the Karma). Plus, the included dock does this cool pulse thing when the karma is docked :-)

The price point on this thing is just right. I got mine on sale for $280 last christmas, while the MSRP is a little higher is still beats the price of the ipod at the same capacity (20 GB)

Audio format support: This thing supports ogg, mp3, wav, flac, and probably more that I am too lazy to go look up.

I do agree that the player is a little bulky, at least in the dimension of width. Were it a little narrower I would say that it is perfect, but it is nowhere near as unwieldy as was my first hd-based player, the Archos Multimedia Jukebox 20.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

I agree. If you want it to work as a stereo appliance mp3 server, that's one thing. But I wouldn't expect to take that with me as a portable. One or the other, maybe.

Portable player? Go with either a low-storage and inexpensive Creative USB player or a high-storage and expensive iPod. Anything in between fails to impress me.

MP3 server for your home stereo? Slap an 80GB drive into an old box with your favorite flavor of OS and remote connect. It's not that hard; my non-geek brother did this for his house (he's a college senior) and it's impressed the hell out of their party guests.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

MP3 server for your home stereo? Slap an 80GB drive into an old box with your favorite flavor of OS and remote connect. It's not that hard; my non-geek brother did this for his house (he's a college senior) and it's impressed the hell out of their party guests.

Or use an old laptop and a wireless card. Share the MP3s out from the network. That's what we did. I don't ever think that our party guests were "impressed" though. It was just part of being in college and having a friend that was a computer dork.

Portable player? Go with either a low-storage and inexpensive Creative USB player or a high-storage and expensive iPod. Anything in between fails to impress me.

Inexpensive/low storage = CD MP3 player. Cheap ($45 or less), portable, and no worries about a hard drive getting owned. It usually has more storage space than flash-based players and it's a lot easier to add more songs when the storage runs out.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

Impressing one's party guests takes considerably more work than that. Back in the day one of my housemates (I didn't live there then actually, I moved in later) paid one of my friends to make him a little serial-controlled infrared remote, this was before the days of widespread PDAs and that same friend later went on to make the best and most popular infrared remote software for the palmpilot, OmniRemote. Anyway the remote controlled a 100 disc pioneer CD jukebox that was patched into the stereo system, and this housemate and I developed a filemaker pro application that would talk to the remote and program the jukebox 32 tracks or so at a time. Now THAT impressed people. These days you can accomplish the same thing much more easily by just MP3ing everything and playing the mp3s from a web interface.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

I own one of these little devices, and I'm very unhappy with the harddrive performance. Not only does it suck battery life while playing, the drive performance seems to suffer after a while - I can't tell if it's fragmentation from being nearly full, or running while the battery slowly drains is causing hardware failures. The sound, though, remains decent. The multiple formats are nice. The software is actually quite good. It's not the type of player where you throw it out after you buy it because it's garbage, but you may want to think carefully before purchasing it.

Not much confidence, but still a good player.

Regarding the lockups, this is a pretty well known issue, and my Karma itself has locked up a few times, but the whack-and-smack solution is just as well known and is surprisingly effective. It's mentioned here:

http://forums-riovolution.com/index.php?showtopic= 4109 [forums-riovolution.com]

Basically, you have to whack the unit hard enough that it turns itself off and restarts. Sure, it's unsettling and even embarassing if you have to sit there in a rush-hour subway train spanking a lump of plastic for ten minutes, but it works. And the strangest part of it all: each time you spank it into submission, it will be a significantly longer period of time before it crashes again. After the fourth and last spanking session, it hasn't locked up once in the past five months.

As for the upside, it has several nice features. The author of the review failed to mention one of the highlights of the Karma-dock's ethernet jack - that it can be used to communicate with any computer that can run Java apps. This turns out to be great, because while the management software can only be installed on windows machines, the Java applet that the Karma serves up via HTTP can be run on Linux and OSX machines. When I get into the office (which is a primarily Mac environment), I just drop it into its cradle, have it DHCP-obtain an IP address (an automatic procedure), fire up the applet from my Power Mac, and I'm free to manage it.

On the usability side, I've been extremely pleased with the Karma. I never quite understood why all of the manufacturers have banded behind Apple's design of placing the display above the main control cluster. It results in the center of gravity being above your hand, making the device much more likely to slip or be knocked out of your grasp. On the Karma, the controls are placed above the display, so that your thumb wraps around the Karma's upper edge and the entirety of its mass is cradled in the palm of your hand. It might look counterintuitive, but I think that's largely because all of the other players out there have the scheme reversed.

The firmware is nice, with three user-adjustable 3-band EQ settings slots that you can flip through to best suit the genre of music you're listening to at the time. The main "menu" button on its face can be customized to drop you at one of several menu levels. For example, if you tend to select music by genre, the main menu button can be set to take you right there instead of to the root level menu. The GUI is consistently themed throughout, and while not as minimal as the iPod's, is not aesthetically offensive. One feature I found very cute was the ability to set the play screen (which you'll be looking at 90% of the time) to be dominated by a pair of mostly useless but amusingly retro-styled VU meters. Unlike the iPod, the Karma *IS* capable of gapless playback, which is great if you listen to a lot of mixed compilations or live performances.

I have only two gripes personally with the unit:
1) The setting for "shuffle"/"normal" playback is buried several levels deep in the menu system.
2) The unit has a 4pin jack next to its headphone jack which is obviously intended for an in-line remote control, but no such item exists. Pooh.

HTH in your buying decisions.

I have one too...

I have one and it's not a firmware issue with the lockups near as I can tell - it's vibration! I have a riding mower, if I take my Karma on that thing for evena short mowing session it locks up. It cannot be shut off, it makes awful sounds, and you have to use the paperclip thing to shut it off. Just as the reviewer discovered - it will not boot up properly afterwards! The solution, as he discovered, is to smack it. I do this on edge in an attempt to help spin the drives as I believe the heads are somehow stuck. Sure enough this fixes it! So far I've only had to do this 2 or 3 times thankfully!

That said - the unit is terrific when it's not being bounced around or vibrated. I use it on travel in airplanes and hooked to my stereo in the garage in it's cradle. Battery life is excellent on plane rides and in my garage I've probably put a couple hundred hours worth of playing into it. I've not yet come close to filling it's drive up but have also not taken much time slecting music (I've got over 130Gig). I do NOT like the interface software to the device, it's not a simple drive letter that I can copy music over to thank you RIAA. If it were I'd have already put much more music on it I'm sure. The software isn't bad, it's just not that great and it insists on indexing my music first which with over 100Gigs takes FOREVER and has caused the software to fail a time or two. My solution is to point it at a folder with only the music I want to transfer over - this multi-step process is why I have so little (about 2gig) music on it .

I've not looked lately for software updates or firmware upgrades but their update process isn't too bad in my experience. What I'd REALLY like, but haven't found, is a WEB interface that would allow me to remotely control the device over the network. Perhaps I'm blind but it seems to me such an interface would be a really good idea considering the silly thing is IP enabled. I've just nto spent too much time loking and havespent more time listening to it I guess (lol). If anyone has found software like this or can point out a feature I've overlooked that allows this I'm all ears!

Whacks & the warranty

Let me get this straight: the Rio Karma, a device whose warranty is a mere 90 days long, requires regular whacks in order to work? Wow, now that's a great combination--the quality is so bad the manufacturer won't even guarantee it will work six months from now, and you have to smack it around to make it even last that long.

The iPod is expensive and it is missing some features, but at least there's a reasonable confidence that a buyer will get at least a years worth of use out of it. The Rio may do gapless playback when it's new, but it seems owners can expect an extended and very quiet gap in its playback not too long after purchase.

Re:Not much confidence, but still a good player.

Sure, it's unsettling and even embarassing if you have to sit there in a rush-hour subway train spanking a lump of plastic for ten minutes... each time you spank it into submission, it will be a significantly longer period of time before it crashes again. After the fourth and last spanking session, it hasn't locked up once in the past five months.

So many jokes, so little time

Re:Not much confidence, but still a good player.

Basically, you have to whack the unit hard enough that it turns itself off and restarts. Sure, it's unsettling and even embarassing if you have to sit there in a rush-hour subway train spanking a lump of plastic for ten minutes, but it works.

Jesus Christ on a popsicle stick... what part of "totally stupid" can you not discern from this scenario? Whacking your hardware is NOT, repeat NOT an acceptable option while troubleshooting. Apple tried this with the Apple III and (rightly) got reamed for it. Almost anybody between the ages of 25 and 35 still has active muscle memory for blowing on an NES 8-bit cart, slamming it into the console, and then whacking the side in order to play Mario Bros. That's not because the 8-bit NES was an aerobic device--that's because the device and the design was a piece of shit.

In case somebody is too slow to follow this, here's a Cochran-esque mnemonic--"If you have to hit, it's a piece of shit."

Slashdot reviews are a total joke. Any sane reviewer would have gotten to the lockup and dropped the review score by a third. When they discover it's a fairly widespread problem, they'd register riokarmasdirtysecret.com and drop the score to a third. When they found out about the generally accepted solution to the problem (donkey-punching a $250 device with a minature hard drive), the score drops to "Only Fools and Degenerates With Poor Genes Buy This". In fact, most reviewers would have turned the review into a grand joke, offering alternative uses for the piece of junk hardware that involve hockey sticks, slingshots or gay porn stars.

I have only two gripes personally with the unit:

Jesus Christ on a unicycle, I think "I occasionaly have to beat the shit out of it to keep it working" would top the fucking list. Instead, there's only "an unused jack" and "it's hard to shuffle songs" make the cut. Please don't breed, KTHXBYE.

That's hilarious!

...really. Your reply contained hockey sticks, gay porn stars, and Jesus Christ on a unicycle. That's humor there.

...but bear in mind that like many buyers, I wasn't aware of the issues when I first made the purchase. My position is that of, "well, I already paid for it, so here's my opinion on the device over-all". And the truth is that it suits me just fine, despite the fact that my heart sank when it froze for the first time. Since a few months back though, I haven't had a single problem with it. I honestly don't know if the issues have since been resolved over at Rio.

That this alone should be reason for me to be sterilized makes me wonder how many people you must tell every day to not breed. Perhaps yours is a world inhabited by people of a much higher calibre than ours. If that's the case, then I envy you deeply. But seriously though, it was a funny read.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

The plus sides:

* Battery life (16 hours with mp3, 12 with Vorbis)
* Gapless playback. This is HUGE for a lot of people. The Karma is the ONLY HD based player which does gapless playback properly. It's the main reason I have one (and would never buy an iPod).
* Sound quality. Measurably better than iPod, also has fully adjustable 5 band parametric EQ.
* RioDJ. This feature allows you to choose specific types of tracks (e.g. stuff I haven't played recently) and a duration, and it will build a playlist on the fly.
* Firmware. Very flexible operation, tons of options (geek friendly!), excellent support from devs on the boards.
* Ethernet on the dock. Allows use with any platform which supports ethernet & java. So Windows, Linux, OSX, BSD etc.
* Formats. Vorbis, FLAC, mp3, wma etc.

There's more, but that's what stands out to me. I bought this thing nearly a year ago (as an aside - why a review now for a player which is pretty much at EOL?) and it's served me very well with no problems at all. The sound quality is great, the interface is easy to use and the gapless playback means I can finally listen to mix & live albums without the fsking pauses.

Re:Does not inspire confidence

Exactly. Further, what are you going to hear from a lot of the people who complained about the iPod's battery being hard to replace? This:

"The hard drive doesn't lock up that often and, anyway, banging it against your desk to get it to work is just fine. Hasn't broken mine yet. See! And... and it plays ogg!"

Uh, yeah. Can you imagine advocating Linux if it were this crippled? "Every so often, eh-heh-heh, /proc disappears. But that's OK - all you need to do is `cat /dev/urandom > /proc' and it magically works again! Weird."

From the next-article-please dept.

This is a terrible "review"! You paid full price (your own fault), and it was a pain to enter the IP address. Yeah, it has a dock. You had problems with the OS, but didn't mention any firmware upgrades that might help solve the problem. You did something stupid that could have broken it. Great.

What about the sound quality? Battery life? User interface? Build quality? Most importantly, given the audience: why would someone purchase this over an iPod? Those are the things we care about, not your anecdotal experience. This would be fine posted on a review site where more information is readily available, but it's certainly not destined for /.'s front page.

P.S.: First on-topic post?

Re:From the next-article-please dept.

I am surprised that he did not return it after having all of those problems and try something else. I can't imagine keeping something that locks up and continues to eat the batteries until you either jam a paper clip into it or slam it on a desk. I am amazed that someone would go through all of that and still want it!

Re:From the next-article-please dept.

the red nipple is not bad for navigation but it is no iPod scroll wheel and it is not as intuitive. most of my friends who've used my ipod figured out how to use the thing within seconds (even the non-techy ones) while questions were always inadvertently asked about the karma. build quality / fragility is also something to be aware of. my ipod has survived a motorcycle crash and multiple trips down to the pavement from about waist height but the LCD on my friend's karma broke while it was in his pocket. he didnt fall, the pocket wasnt especially tight, nothing hit him. guess there was a bit of pressure on the screen and now it's hosed. he seemed to like it a lot while it was working though

Re:From the next-article-please dept.

How well do you find the iPod works while you're on the motorcycle?

I bought a CD/MP3 player with the longest skip protection I could find for listening to through my intercom receiver, but the vibrations of the bike at 50+ mph was too much for it. That was with it in my tank bag, as it was too large to fit comfortably in a jacket pocket. It just wouldn't play at freeway speeds.

I replaced it with a SanDisk Cruzer 256 Mb USB key, with the Cruzer MP3 player. (Cost about $110 total, but I get a combination 256 MB true-keychain USB drive and flash based MP3 player that is instantly upgradable.) So far this has worked fine, both in the tank bag or it easily fits into a jaket pocket, but 256 Mb is still a bit limited for what I would like to carry around with me. Actually I should probably submit an actual review of it...

Re:From the next-article-please dept.

Well, he comes right out and EXPLAINS why you'd buy this over an iPod - he only runs Linux. Last I checked, iPods weren't doing much of anything under Linux.

When [sourceforge.net] was the [gnu.org] last time [sourceforge.net] you [structbench.com] checked [sourceforge.net]?

"It plays Oggs" doesn't exactly make up for the "It suffers from a well known and widespread flaw that forces the user to beat the crap out of it in hopes that it will correct itself and not die under the pummeling" angle.

Re:From the next-article-please dept.

Um, if your music collection is in ogg files, then any music player that doesn't play them is just a pretty lump of plastic.

Re:From the next-article-please dept.

the iPod works great under Linux. USB is plug-and-go since it's just a Mass Storage device. To load songs on you have to use a program to manage the database but that just runs in userspace. gtkpod is pretty full-featured and GNUpod is great for shell junkies.

The thing does come formatted HFS+ but the included Windows software allows you to reformat it as FAT. Linux supports both though most people find it easier to use FAT. It's also possible to reformat it manually from Linux though that's a little bit tricky.

Note that this is 3rd-gen iPods... previous models only supported Firewire and HFS+ so they were a little harder to use under Linux (but people did it anyway).

OS-agnostic?

The belief that, at our present level of knowledge, we cannot know whether or not an OS exists. Fair enough.

Alt review

Karma: Terrible (mostly the sum of user experiences)

FYI rio has really bad quality control

I bought a RIO nitrus and had it's hard drive fail within 2 weeks of purchase. I had it replaced 3 times over the next few months and none of the models lasted more than a month when all they did was ride in my back pack as I walked to class. Recently I bought one of the new Rio Forges and it also has problems. Despite being sold as a "sport" model it shuts down regularly during use and Rio refuses to admit any problem with the design despite several pages of experiences just like mine on their forums. I strongly discourage anyone from buying Rio products without an extended warrenty. Here is a good forums to read about Rio products: http://www.rioworld.org/yabbse/index.php?board=16

Re:FYI rio has really bad quality control

So you kept buying them?

Rio Karma

These things are crap... Everyone I know who bought one has returned it at least once because of the 1" HD "hard locking". One friend has been through 5 units so far, with the average lifespan being 7-10 days per unit.

I haven't heard similar things about the iPod (anyone?), but I suspect it's the 1" HDs that are to blame, rather than the design of the unit housing them.

Rio Good Karma

I own one of these beasts too.

The number one thing that I love about this device is the Rio DJ - Entertain me! function. What it does is looks at the most played tracks in a certain time period (15 minutes to everything on the Karma) and then plays a random mix of them. Awesome!

The second best thing is the crossfade feature under the Equalizer function. It basically makes a nice seamless mix of music that fades in and out of each track.

Battery life is great! I regularly get 10hrs of music out of it.

The only downsides I've discovered are that the little stick selector is flimsy, and the ethernet port is very flaky when it comes to working with switches. Neither my D-Link or Netgear 10/100 switches work with it, so I have resorted to loading the Windows software to load music.

Banged it on the desk?!?

Going into rescue mode showed that it was having trouble reading the disk. (crap!) After reading some message boards where others have experienced similar problems, I decided that I had little to lose and smacked it flat down on the desk. The Karma made a little grinding noise and booted up!

This is probably the most telling sentence in the review. The firmware for this device is not capable of even a REBOOT when there's a hard drive error. NO recovery, NONE. The *only* recourse was a "smack it flat down on the desk," indicating that the firmware had quite obviously tried to get the hard drive to perform some physically impossible task... and banging the HD juggled the heads enough to produce either a good error or knock the firmware out of its loop and find the data it needs.

Firmware issues... yuck. Wonder if I can convince my web guys to drop their 1U server boxes on the floor when they're being slow to help jiggle those hard drives into compliance???

Not a firmware problem

No, from my understanding (I own a Karma, and I spent about three months reading pretty much every post on the Karma forums) the problem is with the hard disk; sometimes (rarely, it's never happened to me) surface tension can prevent the disk spinning up after a spin down.

Banging the Karma releases the surface tension. Rio deny this (they say they can't reproduce the problem) but if it's not a problem with the hard disk then I'd like to hear the alternatives (I don't buy your ideas that it "produces a good error" or "knocks the firmware out of it's loop", sorry!)

The Karma is by no means perfect but:

* The sound is great
* OGG, FLAC
* No DRM
* Nice DJ features
* Nice interface
* Ethernet
* Great battery life
* It's not a poncy, proprietary and expensive iPod.

If they could fix the stability issues, and add:

* USB Mass Storage support (for USB2 Linux connectivity)
* Remote control over Ethernet (sit comfy and control what songs play from my laptop or PDA)
* A record function

then

* Make it smaller
* Make it cheaper
* Fit an even bigger hard disk

it would be perfect.

Is that a better review than the story? Mod me up.

My review of the Karma.

I also got a Rio Karma within the last month. I had been looking at these things for about a year but was waiting for someone to make a case for the sang things prior to buying one. Now Vaja leather has a 75$ case (nice looking) so I took the plunge. Right when I got the thing I updated the firmware, say what you will about Rio at least they keep the updates comming. The sound quality is great and the software is very nice. It supports MP3, OGG, WMA and FLAC formats (the Windows software includes rippers for all formats) somthing that no digital audio player sporting more then a gig should be without (FLAC format with 20GB storage is great). Battery life for me is around 12hours, but I've not yet fully conditioned the battery (you need to fully charge and discharge it five times says the manual). The dock is interesting, but without a way to controll playback via the net I dont see the point since USB 2.0 is faster then 100base-t for transfering songs. Have I said that the audio quality is stunning? Well it is, the five bad EQ qorks great and with +-95db range music sounds very good for a portable system (the packed ear buds suck). This feels like the audiophiles MP3 player.

Reliability

I've had one of these for almost a year now. I use it exclusively for playing oggs and exclusively with Linux. It works really well. I've got about 1300 songs on it, almost all encoded at 360kpbs. Sounds fantastic.

I have had a couple of freezeups and various glitches but they all have been minor and have been resolved by either a reset (the paper clip) or powering it off and then on.

I really like that I can use it with Linux and that it uses ethernet connectivity. (BTW: It's not that bad setting a static IP address - takes about 2 minutes)

One question: Where's the "developer's site on the internet" for the java transfer software? Would it be so hard to include a link?

Re:Reliability

http://rmml.dev.java.net

Re:Why do you need the Karma?

Must've been one of those analog CD players then.

Re:Why do you need the Karma?

I also had a 110 (actually 110 + 1), and a 400 CD changer both of which had the random function. But, I didn't find it totally satisfactory. Most notably the noise when changing disks, and also the delay between songs.

I also have the Karma now (it was a gift), and I LOVE it! What maybe isn't clear in the original article is the user doesn't just turnn on the Karma in random mode and let it play for four hours. The Karma has a DJ "wizard", and you can ask it to generate playlists for you based on criteria. Some examples, but not limited to:

• length of playing time you want your playlist to cover
• exclusion (don't put any songs I've listened to on the playlist from the last xx days)
• genre of music selected for your playlist
• linear, repeat, shuffle (random) playing of items from playlist
• "popularity" of songs (put songs into playlist from the top xx listened-to songs)
• year music is from
• "oldies" (add songs to playlist which I haven't listened to in the last xx days or weeks)

My CD changers served me well, but I welcome the change and improvement... (for example, it is really nice to be able to slip the Karma out of its dock, and go out and do yard work with the same selection of songs as what I had indoors. Additionally, even recording mp3's at 192K, I have a 2/3 full Karma with almost 200 CD's

Also, instead of a 30 lb. (fully loaded) changer taking up lots of space in my cabinet, the Karma is itsy-bitsy, and can be put anywhere.

Not saying your changer isn't plenty good, but if you ever get the opportunity (fits your budget, a good friend gives you one :-), blah, blah, blah), go for it... you won't be disappointed.

Scary lockups aside...

Are you kidding me? No matter how great the rest of the features, "scary lockups" are not something most people will just ignore - especially when they cause the hard drive to seek for 40 continuous minutes, draining the battery. I'll keep my iPod, thanks very much, and when I want to replace it, this Rio will not be on my list for consideration.

Archos is open source..

I have had an Archos for about a year and have been very happy. The open source Rockbox [freshmeat.net] software is great..

I don't see much point in the Karma. It is expensive.. somewhat unstable.. and like most proprietary products, will be End of Life'd soon enough.

What I would really like to have is WAV recording capability. Though the MP3 recording on the Archos has worked well and I have sourced at least one concert using it with the line-in and good mics.

Good recording capability is lacking in most products.

Not the First Rio HD Unit.

The Rio Riot [everythingusb.com] was the first HD unit by Rio. I own one myself, and it was a terrific audio device until a mishap with a homebrew car docking cradle fried the system board. I attempted to fix it, but when it was apart, I accidently tore the thin plastic LCD connector (which had its "grain" perpendicular to the conductors, and thus tore in a way I can't repair). I really miss it for music, but the good side is that I now have a decent battery for "projects" and a 20-GB harddrive which I am trying to mate with my Sharp Zaurus SL-C860 PDA.

Sonic Blue, however, is horrible with support. They released very few software updates, and the device only worked with MusicMatch Jukebox. But the interface was awesome, and the sound quality was quite good for a portable unit.