Customer Reviews

Rio PMP 300 Special-Edition MP3 Player

5 star:		(95)
4 star:		(56)
3 star:		(33)
2 star:		(30)
1 star:		(51)

 

 

The Rio PMP300 is a great portable system if you have access to your own computer. Some advantages are that it's very small, very light, it doesn't skip, It only takes 1 battery which runs for at least 10 hrs, and the music can be free on the internet. You can also take tracks right off your favorite CDs. The 1 problem that I have with it is that it only holds 32 MB which is about 7 or 8 CD quality songs. It could hold more if you don't mind radio quality. If you want to get more memory on this thing it's not cheap. You can double your memory from 32MB to 64MB for about $100. I am going to wait for the price to go down before I buy more memory for mine. The software that it comes with is pretty good too. I also like the overall design of the buttons and player. It has a Hold option, 5 different Equalizers, Replay and Random modes, and a cool A~B feature which is pointless fun to play with.

I bought my Rio about 2 months ago. It plays perfectly, and I have no complaints with the performance. But if you are going to take this with you as a truely "portable" unit you are going to be stuck with only 30 minutes of storage for cd quality music. Maybe that's not a problem for you, but personally I need more of a variety of music when I take this on a trip. And the extra 32-meg flash memory cards cost $100!! That's way too much just to hold an extra 30 minutes of music. I recently sold my Rio and purchased a portable Minidsic player/recorder for $275. My advice to people would be to save an extra $100 and go for the minidisc. It uses digital sound, and does not skip. You can use it to record mp3's from your computer and the blank 74 minute discs cost less than $5 a piece, as opposed to $100 for a 30-minute flash memory card for the Rio. Minidisc is a much better overall value than the Rio. I would not recomend any buy a portable mp3 player until the storage can be greatly increased at a much lower cost.

As you may surmise from my email address, I know and care a thing or two about mp3s and their future. Unfortunately for anyone who bought one, Diamond Rio is not in that future. Granted, this 64mb unit (upgrade to 96 for a hefty charge) is an improvement over the impotent 32mb original. But if you care at all about the quality of the music you listen to, and if you also like the idea of listening to a lot of DIFFERENT music when you're out and about, then DON'T BUY THE RIO! The mp3s I encode are ripped at a bitrate of either 160 or 192kbps depending on the contents of the song. At that you could only fit about 12 songs onto this guy (if you're lucky). What a waste! There is a cd-mp3 player (which interestingly amazon does not offer...) which allows you 10 times the capacity (and with 40 sec esp there is not much chance of skipping). Also, down the road a few months there will be a player with a 4GB+ capacity! I don't know the specifics of this technology, but I am willing to wait for that and let Diamond Multimedia go back to making killer graphics cards -- something that they are actually good at.

This product is awesome to take w/ you on the bus to a sports event. I'm in highschool and it is really convient to have one object instead of a hundred cds and a player that always skips. The time limit is the most controversial subject. Take it from me. When you play songs that you really love a good 45 min. will keep you occupied for hours. The only bad thing is that I'm so scared I'll drop it! Overall a most definetly get right away product.

the player itself is awesome, and the new feature with the remote headphones is a real good step up, but in my opinion, they should put a lot more memory on it. if you're a teenager, and you're far from home, and all you have is your single mp3 player and no flash memory and your friend or whatever doesn't have a computer or the cable what have you, you're going to get bored of the 9 or 10 songs you have on it (cd quality, 15 or so with radio quality) besides the memory it's great, but one thing i think rio should have deffinitly added to it would be a screen with a back light, cause whenever you're in the dark you're not going to be able to see what track you're on, but these are just my opinions, don't take them if you don't want them, but besides that, i think it's awesome

I read every single review on this page before making my purchase, and all I can say is that IT IS DEFINITELY WORTH IT, but only if you have a fast internet connection (I have cable). I also suggest getting the additional flash card. It takes 3-4 minutes to download a 4 MB song from the Internet. You need a lot of HD space or a ZIP drive also, because once you start downloading songs, you can kind of get addicted to downloading them and being able to hear new stuff. And the convenience and sound quality is amazing. I primarily use it on my drive to and from work, and the 64 MB of space holds plenty of music (15-17 songs), until I get home and can change out the songs. That is so much more convenient than having to switch CD's every time you want to hear your favorite songs, or having to wait for the CD Changer in your car to shuttle between discs just to hear one song. The leather carrying case is worth it, although I had to rig a small strap onto it in order to hang it from the Stairmaster at the gym. I'm sure there are better MP3 players available, but they're so much more expensive, and you're better served using that money towards more memory.

P.S. Don't believe Sony's hype. All you MiniDisc lovers spent too much money on a format that's going the way of the Betamax.

I got the PMP300 as a birthday present, and I love it. I am a college student, and i already have a huge MP3 library on my desktop. I also discovered that more than half my MP3s are encoded at 64 kbps, so I can fit a little over an hour of my favorites on it and take it with me to (boring) lectures, the library, or to work out. This BS about only fitting 30 minutes of music is because the encoding is at CD-quality...I've never noticed a difference. With the rebates, it is almost as inexpensive as a Sport Discman, but gets better battery life, weighs less, and i can listen to what I want without switching CDs (as if I could carry more than one CD when i'm jogging anyways). I am definitely a computer geek, so I wasn't worried about setting it up...but the setup was so simple a 5 year old could do it. Looking forward to taking it on long bus rides to crew races this spring. Great little player for the money.

I must warn you. You can get a lot of different kinds of MP3 players, and I must warn you. Do not buy a Rio. I bought one, and my first one was broken. I E-mailed the company, and I had to send it back. And I got my replacement pretty quickly. But managing to break my happiness is that its also broken. The next day my $50 rebate was declined. And after emailing my story to them, they decided to ignore the E-mail. I must advise against buying a Rio, you can buy so many other kinds.

I have to say, this thing works awesome and the price is right. If you want to spend 250% more, go ahead and buy the Rio 500, but this thing does exactly what it is supposed to do: play high quality music without skipping. I skied with it last weekend and was amazed. I would say that you are probably not going to want to listen to classical music with this; it lends itself more towards "loud" music. The only down side is the completely unresponsive customer service. Eric Thomas with Diamond never returned my 5 calls when I tried to find out how to get the rebate (go to the website).

PROS:
The form factor of the device is good. It is small, easy to exercise with.

CONS:
+ NT drivers are horrible. They don't support NT. You have to find shareware to download MP3's to it.
+ On Win98 machine, the out-of-the-box software that Rio came with would not recognize my second memory card.
+ The base 32MB of memory was corrupted on mine. Some songs skip around or get mixed up as a result. + Rio customer service is sub-par. I waited about an hour to talk to someone.

All in all, a very bad customer experience. I will probably buy a different MP3 player to replace this.