Rio S10 64 MB MP3 Player

by Rio

Product Details

Product Manual [637kb PDF]

• Item Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00006HYJ3
• Item model number: 90260384
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,356 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Took a chance and was pleasantly surprised, October 29, 2002

By 

WILLIAM PARKS (PELHAM, NH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rio S10 64 MB MP3 Player (Electronics)

Did some research on MP3 players to use while working out. Biggest complaints surrounded use of software to download MP3's or WMA's(Windows Media)to the player. Also wanted to be able to Rip songs off my current CD's to download to the Player. The software was very easy to install (I use Win 2000) and my pc had no problem picking up the new USB connection. After I installed the Software I connected the player and was ready to go. I used Windows 2000 to copy my CD's down to the hard drive in the WMA format. Then using RIO manager I could pick and choose which songs I wanted to hear. The software allows you to sort very large libraries of songs by Genre, Album, Song List and Playlist. The download time for a full CD's worth of sound is about five minutes. The display shows Album, Artist and song title and other info like volume and battery meter. You can shuffle songs and you can apply several setting using an onscreen menu list (i.e. equalizer, powersaver, etc). Also the battery life has been excellent, 3 hours of use and still showing 3/4 full. Headphones are OK (ear plugs only) Very nice padded belt clip stays where you put it.

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for the gym, April 30, 2003

By 

Piso Mojado (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rio S10 64 MB MP3 Player (Electronics)

A nice, simple MP3 player, just the thing for working out at the gym.

Compact, light weight, looks good, plastic but seems sturdy enough; nice padded case with belt clip. Fairly easy to operate: menus could be improved, but it's a barebones little player and you won't be fiddling with the menus very often. Sounds good to me. I listen to classical on Koss PortaPro headphones, and I'm picky about sound. If you listen in a very noisy environment, or if you just like your music REALLY LOUD, you will want to normalize low level recordings before you convert them to MP3.

The 64 MB built-in memory is a joke, and when you update the firmware (and you should) you will have 61 MB left. Count on buying a memory card. With updated firmware, it will take SD memory cards up to 512 MB. The 512 MB cards are priced out of sight, but I found a name brand 256 MB card for $... That gives me 4 1/2 hours play time. It runs on one AA battery, and the batteries last a long time. I don't need to take the batteries out when I'm not listening, like I did with my tape players and radios.

Can't comment on the headphones (which I tossed) or the Windows software. It works fine with a Mac and iTunes.

If you're traveling or going away to school and music is important to you, get an iPod. If you just want something to take to the gym, this will do. Budget another $... for a memory card and better headphones. I give it 4 stars out of 5 for being slightly overpriced. SONICblue should either cut the list price or build it with 128 MB.

Be aware that as of now (April 2003) SONICblue is going through bankruptcy.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good hardware and design, less good software, January 24, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Rio S10 64 MB MP3 Player (Electronics)

First, the good news: this player is probably the most well-designed and easiest to use of any mp3 players (of its capacity) that I have seen, not to mention it's quite reasonably priced. Though hooking the player up to your PC and uploading songs to it takes the usual basic computer skills, once the songs are on the player, even the computer illiterate (read: my parents!) can figure out how to use the Rio S10 and change the settings. The menus are very intuitive as are the layout of the buttons. The S10 comes with 64 MB internal memory (which is, to be honest, not nearly enough), and I just added another 128 MB, and it was a breeze to do (just buy the MMC card, open the player where the battery goes, and slide the MMC card in into the only obvious slot it could possibly go) and it worked right off the bat. Further, the little cover case that comes with it fits perfectly, protecting the player. The size of the whole unit is smaller than a pack of cigarettes, and easily fits in my pocket. The in-ear headphones that come with it are pretty much junk, but that's to be expected, I guess.

Now, the less good news: when I first got this player (January '03), it was incompatible with my motherboard (MSI Nvidia Nforce with AMD chip) and so I couldn't upload songs to the player. Basically, the player was useless. Sonicblue's support web page was very unhelpful, and tech support was horrendous (they put me on hold forever, were obtuse, and hardly spoke English). They kept having me reinstall (many times) the software that you put on your PC, but it was clear that was not the problem and instead my problem was that the firmware was incompatible with my PC's motherboard. They would have none of it and insisted it was something else. In fact, they even said that even if it was a compatibility problem, this was technically not their fault and they couldn't refund me! Since they don't tell you beforehand what motherboards the player is compatible with, I think that is a horrendous thing to say to a customer. I was very disappointed. Nonetheless, I did what they said (reinstalling the software on my PC a million times) and, needless to say, it didn't work. So I gave up and decided I was just stuck with a piece of junk.

Fast forward to several weeks ago (late April '03). I noticed that, finally, a newer version of the firmware was out. Since the player was not working with my motherboard, I used a friend's computer to upgrade the firmware on the S10 (since the player didn't work on my PC, I couldn't even upgrade the firmware on my own computer) from version 1.60 to version 1.80. I thought I'd do it just for kicks, to see if it might work. Amazingly, the new firmware worked and all my problems were solved! My Rio S10 now works perfectly with my motherboard. Though SonicBlue still doesn't publish a list of which motherboards the player is compatible with, I would suspect that they have finally ironed out most compatibility problems with the newest firmware (I just saw that version 1.84 came out last week, or early May).

Also, I should mention that the software that comes with the player which you install on your PC (called Rio Music Manager, or just RMM) is pretty lousy. It gets the job done allright, but it's clumsy and if you have any more than a couple dozen mp3's or wma's (I have thousands), it's a major pain to organize them. Once you find the songs you want, uploading them is a breeze; it's just the way RMM organizes them that is terrible. However, you can also use RealPlayer instead of RMM (the appropriate drivers come with the Rio S10). It's somewhat better.

So, in conclusion, I would have given the player 5 stars, but the fact that their tech support was terrible and that it took them this long to come out with a fix, forces me to only give the player 4 stars. Had I not gone through the headaches of the past 4 months, the Rio S10 would have gotten 5 stars.