Rio Nitrus 1.5 GB MP3 Jukebox

by Rio

Product Details

Product Manual [1.32mb PDF]

• Item Weight: 3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000AQIFY
• Item model number: 90260512
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (179 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

From the Manufacturer It's true, Great things come in small packages. Users who desire exceptional soundin a tight design will love the Rio Nitrus. Have access to over 50 hours of music right from your pocket.

The Rio Nitrus features a sleak design with all the necessary ports.

The revolutionary Rio Nitrus packs 1.5 GB into a stealthy, razor-thin design. With the ability to carry over 750 songs, never before has this much capacity been offered on a player this small. Fast USB 2.0 connection loads the player quickly. Simple menus, thoughtful controls, and a clear display make navigation instinctive. A 5-Band Adjustable Equalizer provides a custom listening experience. Quality components throughout yield a player without compromise Features 1.5 GB HDD plays back over 50 hours of WMA or 25 hours of MP3 music (over 750 WMA or 375 MP3 songs) Transfer content between multiple PCs 16-hour continuous playback with the rechargeable LiIon battery USB 2.0 for Fast Transfers 5-Band Adjustable Equalizer with pre-sets High Performance Earbuds 5-Band Parametric Equalizer with pre-sets Auto-DJ intelligently finds, mixes and creates playlists from tracks on command Box Contents: Rio Nitrus 1.5, High Performance Ear Buds, USB 2.0 Cable, Power Supply, Installation Disk, Quick Start Guide, Warranty Card

Choose your music. Choose your device. Know it's going to work. Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you're shopping for a portable music or video device and you want to make sure the digital music and video you purchase will play back on it every time. Match the PlaysForSure logo on a large selection of leading devices and online music stores. If you see the logo, you'll know your digital music will play for sure. The PlaysForSure logo makes it easy to find digital media stores and devices that work together. Choose from a large number of digital music and video stores, including CinemaNow, MSN Music, MusicMatch, MusicNow, Napster, Wal-Mart Music Downloads, and many more. Look for the PlaysForSure logo on a wide variety of devices including portable music devices, portable video devices, digital audio receivers, Pocket PC's and Smartphones. The checkmarks indicate if the device is capable of playing back audio and/or video that's been downloaded from an online store. Additionally some devices will be able to play back media that has been purchase through an online store that offers subscription or rentals.

Learn more about PlayForSure and how it works.

Product Description

Rio Nitrus 1.5GB Digital Audio Player - The Nitrus from Rio combines the small physical size of flash memory players, with the large storage space of hard drive based players. It does this by using a tiny 1" hard drive that can store up to 1.5GB of music! Its durable plastic body with rubber bumpers is perfect for the active individual. Supports - Windows 98SE, Me, 2000, or XP

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 94 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Overall A Good Product, January 17, 2004

By 

Richard Diaz (Salt Lake City, Utah USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rio Nitrus 1.5 GB MP3 Jukebox (Electronics)

I purchase my Rio Nitrus a week ago, at first I had various doubts about this product. I had read some reviews that made seem as a horrible product, while other reviews called it marvelous. But first things first, I decided to purchase this product because of its size (it literally fits in my fist), and also because it can play Windows Media Audio (something that the ipod doesn't do). .... Installing the program on windows XP was very easy, and the same goes for installing songs in the player. I wasn't able to put 1.5 gigabytes of music in it, it only allowed me 1.4 bytes, overall I had a little bit over 500 songs (all of my songs are WMA's recorded at 128). Now onto the bad part. . .like some other reviews mentioned, Rio really screwed up with the volume buttons, they are too close together. Another small mistake are the headphones, personally I don't like the headphones that come with the unit, they are too small, and at times annoying (this is my personal opinion). However, don't get me wrong the sound of unit is amazing, when I first played a song I was amazed at how clear and loud the song was. Some of the thing I most enjoy about this player are the playlist, for example out of the 500 songs I have two playlists, one is compose of slow songs that I listen to while going to sleep, or in the bus, the other is call "top 20" which are usually the best 20 song I want to hear on my player. The rio nitrus has amazing search abilities, for example, you can search a song by its name, album, artist, etc., Or you can just shuffle and play all the songs (repeat is also available, but i don't use it). Overall this is good player, besides minor little problems (for me) such as the volume and headphones, I give the Nitrus 4.5 stars out of 5. If your interested in buying this product, I recommend you download its manual, and/or search for a professional review such PC world etc., One more thing so far my Nitrus has been working fine, I was a bit scare since I read all those "my player broke the same day I got it etc.," reviews, but for at least it seems to work just fine. Update, its been a month since I've purchase my nitrus, and it works just like it did when I bought it, the only exception is that now it has a few scrachtes, but nothing elses I'm still very please with this player. Update, My player Finally broke. . .everything was working fine but then I turn it off, and the next time I turn it on, it wouldn't go on past the RIO screen. So I call customer service, and they told me to do a hard reset, then upgrade to the lates firmware, and voila it work ... So right now is working fine.

49 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tiny, light, great soundings Player, September 26, 2003

By 

"rory_in_toronto" (Toronto, ON.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rio Nitrus 1.5 GB MP3 Jukebox (Electronics)

I've been previewing the Nitrus (pronounced: Night-russ) and have been playing with it for close to two months, now. I should also note that I'm not an employee of Rio. For really good unofficial tech support from other users, go to rioworld.org or riovolution.com. Nitrus is about a third of the weight of an iPod, small and very thin. When it's in your pocket, you forget it's there. I'm not joking! This isn't the case with the iPod or the Karma. If you want storage capacity, you'll be buying a Karma. However, that's not the market for this player. The form, size and weight, combined with about 400 songs capacity (1.5GB) is the combination that will attract certain buyers. So, you can't really compare it with the iPod/Karma's of the world, or the flash players. Totally different market segment. It's not designed to be a sports player, but I, and many others, have been using it for athletic activities and it's sweet!! You forget it's there. It also has the standard Rio stopwatch functions. It has a bookmark feature, which is great on my audiobooks! Runs off USB 2.0 or 1.1! There's an intermediate lock selection that allows you to hit the joystick to move between play/pause. Perfect for snowboarding or exercising. Plus, with about 400 songs, you don't have to move songs on and off the player like a flash-based player. So, it carves out a nice (and new!) middle ground. Most consumers wouldn't want more songs on a player (unless you're a capacity freak, as I can sometimes be). It's not as feature rich as the Karma, but NOTHING is! Karma beats iPod, hands down and everything else in features. With Nitrus, you can create playlists, sort by ID3 tags, it has a customizable five-band equalizer and the sound is great. With the Sennheiser earbuds and customizable equalizer it will be a market leader in sound quality. Firmware is solid, right out of the box. If you've owned a Rio before, you know the developers are dedicated to constantly upgrading the firmware. Rio Music Manager (RMM2) The desktop software RMM2 (Rio Music Manager) is a huge leap ahead from the last RMM. It is being used for the whole Rio line. You can create playlists, to auto-DJ mixes and rip CDs. You can play music within the player, create auto-synch profiles between your player and RMM. It also has Gracenote CDDB, an on-line database that fills in all the album info for CDs you rip! RMM is user-friendly, intuitive and a solid piece of software. Rio Taxi: Nitrus also has Rio Taxi, like Karma, which allows you to move any type of file. I've been using it to transfer docs between work and home without issue. Taxi is simple and clean and works without issue. Battery Life: 16 hours listed, soon to be officially 19 hrs, but I'm getting longer than that. About Karma, people should note that Karma is slightly thicker than the iPod for one main reason: battery life!!! latest generation iPod = 8hrs (cut from 10hrs of 1st generation, which is how they shaved thickness). Interesting priorities at Apple, eh? Karma = 15 hours Nitrus = 16 hours (I seem to get longer play out of mine, but that's what Rio is advertising, so I'll stick to that). This is based on 128 bit MP3's. Note that many other MP3 players advertise battery life based on 64 or 96bit WMA's, as lower bit rate files consume less power! As well, you can adjust backlight length on these players, or turn it off completely, which greatly extends battery life beyond 16 hours. Really nice indigo backlight on these players and clear text display. So, that's a basic overview. Nitrus is going to be the surprise hit of the Rio line. Given that Denon & Marantz, a very high-end audio company, now owns Rio, combined with listening to Nitrus while previewing it, I think the whole Rio line will become the audiophile's digital music player!!

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Just what I was looking for..., December 28, 2003

By 

A. Young (Whitestone, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rio Nitrus 1.5 GB MP3 Jukebox (Electronics)

Would I recommend this mp3 player to others? Definitely.

1) Style and Sound... Even in a world of mp3 players with bigger names, memories, and prices, I must say that this player rocks. The sound is sick even with the included dinky headphones - the volume goes up to a measure of 30 which I have yet to reach because 23 is loud enough for most of my mp3's. The design is also welcoming: it's a small and thin black device, extremely light, with a nice navigation button, volume control, a locking device, and a nice display which lights up during use. I use the rio for everything from going to the gym to traveling on the subway and I'm very happy with it eventhough I could have spent another $100 on an IPOD.

2) Technicalities... Something people usually don't mention in these reviews is the process of transferring songs on to the player. This is extremely important for the new buyer. The rio nitrus is very user friendly in this department. It uses a USB cable which you connect from the tower to the device. Once you install the software, you can easily access your downloaded music and transfer it to the player. This is a little different from the IPOD software where you drag and drop but it is just as easy and comparably quick. The device has a memory of 1.5GB which is about 375 songs. I personally will probably not transcend this mark because I don't have anywyhere near as many songs as that - but if this is an issue for you, you should probably look into the IPOD or others. The actual usage and navigation of the device is also user friendly. After you label your songs how you wish, they are listed alphabetically and you can play them all in shuffle mode or go directly to them. There are also other options some which I haven't looked into yet and others such as playlists etc. which I really don't care about but if you want to read the instructions on them I'm sure it's not an arduous task to complete.

3) Price, Alternatives, Conclusion... I got my player for $215, which is probably a little high. But it was definitely worth it because it gives me all I need. I mean I know the swing wheel on the IPOD is enticing as well as its other features, but the IPOD is more like a computer and I'm not looking for such a device. If you need memory past the 375 song capacity but want to spend less, look into 5GB IPODS or something similar. There are also issues with the lithium battery which the IPOD also shares. Because the nitrus is no where near as popular as the IPOD it has not even been addressed for this rio but apparently these batteries die after a year or so. I really don't know about this, but it is something to be aware of. I've also read that some customers had defective products, I'm not sure how common that is but I've had no problems so far. I feel that the rio nitrus has everything you need for less money. It's my first mp3 player and will probably be my last.