Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2003/10/30/rio_chiba_256mb_mp3_player/

Rio Chiba 256MB MP3 player

Farewell, jog-dial controls

By Tony Smith

Posted in Personal Tech, 30th October 2003 12:38 GMT

Reg Review First Diamond Multimedia, then Sonic Blue, now Digital Networks. The Rio range of portable digital music players may have had many parent companies since it was launched back in the late 1990s, but the MP3 pioneer is still going strong. This past summer saw the family updated with set of new solid-state and hard drive-based players.

Leading the solid-state line-up is the Rio Chiba, available in two versions, one with 256MB of storage and an all-black 'urban' casing colour scheme, the other with 128MB and a white-on-black 'sport' theme. We took a look at the first of the two.

The Chiba may boast an unusual, asymmetric design but it fits snugly in the palm of your hand, with the 'Riostick' joystick control in easy reach of your thumb - as is the player's Menu button.

The nice, backlit LCD is large enough to display track name, artist and album title, along with a play progress bar. Clicking the joystick cycles through track time; time elapsed; equaliser setting; file type, encoding rate and size data; and the date and time. A sixth line shows the volume level, playback mode, player mode (radio or digital music) and battery level.

The power button, control lock catch and volume rocker switch are located on top of the player. Underneath sit the headphone jack and the mini-USB 1.1 connector used to interface with the host computer. Half the back of the device comes away to reveal the AAA battery bay and the SD card slot. Behind the battery cover, your memory cards are protected from pocket fluff. Unfortunately, it also means you have to remove the battery before you can insert or remove a card.

Command and control

Chiba's joystick-controlled interface is a new twist on player controls and a big improvement on the now ten-a-penny jog-dials. Able to move in four directions, and with click and click-and-hold actions, the stick provides almost all the navigation controls you need in one. All your track actions are in one place: nudge up for play/pause, down for stop. Push right or left to skip tracks - keep the stick pressed and you fast-forward/rewind (albeit silently). Once you've pressed the menu button, you navigate the player UI using the same control.

The UI is like a hierarchical pop-up menu: a list of options to scroll through, nudging the stick right to select, left to return to the previous menu, pressing down to select the option.

It's remarkably quick and allows you to control the device pretty much with just your thumb, and maybe your index finger too, to set the volume. Players with jog-dials usually require a host of other buttons and aren't as intuitive: jog-dials necessitate one-dimensional UIs that are often tricky to navigate quickly. A fast UI is essential in a portable device you don't want to be flashing around in public any more than you have to.

Calling up the menu provides access to the player's settings, including playback options - shuffle and repeat either one song or all of them; the display's contrast and backlit duration; the auto-power off timer, and the player's resume state; and the player's equaliser. The latter offers five pre-sets, plus 'normal' - ie. off and a custom option that pulls up five-band sliders controlled using the stick. EQ settings are a matter of personal taste. We found the pre-sets useless but the custom mode allowed us to get the sound we like.

The menu also activates the player's stopwatch function, though why it has one we couldn't figure out. More useful is the FM radio facility. The Chiba's settings allow you to flip the radio from US to European mode, which gives us Brits more finely graded (0.05MHz) hops through the spectrum, the better to zero in on particular broadcasts. Favoured-station frequencies can be fixed into any of eight pre-sets. The settings also allow you to turn stereo reception off, which eliminates the hiss you get whenever you use a radio without a good stereo antenna - a feature not usually associated with portable players.

Actually, we've used a few portable FM radios that are hissy even in monaural mode, but apart from a few pops, the Chiba's reception is pretty good.

So is MP3 playback. We loaded the player up with four albums' worth of 128Kbps MP3s encoded in iTunes and worked our way through them, at home, on the bus, even on the noisy London Underground. Rio bundles a pair of $8 earbuds from headphone specialist Sennheiser. The sound they produce is rather good - better than the cheap phones shipped with lesser brands - but not a patch on the warm, more robust sound that our iPod 'buds produce.

The Chiba's sound isn't perfect. There's a distinct high-pitched buzz sent through the 'phones when the device is turned on and off. And pressing any of the controls sends a spike through the audio circuits. Fortunately, these heartbeat-like pops are only audible when the volume is turned up to maximum and no song is playing, so the chances of actually hearing them are slim. They certainly didn't spoil our listening pleasure, but that's no excuse for poor circuit design, dodgy components, firmware glitches or a combination of the three. Digital Networks needs to address this.

Connection

Like Creative's MuVo NX, the Chiba is one of those rare beasts, a non-Apple MP3 player that's Mac compatible. Unlike the Creative player, the Chiba works directly with iTunes, appearing as an icon in the playlist panel, allowing you to drag tracks over just as you would with in iPod. With the player connected, two buttons appear that allows you to upload firmware and format the player's storage, respectively.

While iTunes lists the player's song list in order, the player itself lists them by filename. Unfortunately, it doesn't support long Mac file names, and the truncation process yields a set of songs that are no longer in order. Renaming the files numerically before copying them over solves the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary. Since the player has access to the tracks' ID3 data, it should organise playback on the basis of that information.

Rio's iTunes support also doesn't go as far as allowing you to compile playlists. Only the Windows-only Rio software lets you do that. The player will also work with Windows' RealOne jukebox software, but like iTunes its functionality isn't as complete as Rio's own code.

While Mac users can't create playlists, the Chiba does provide a bookmark feature. Intended to record different users' settings, the bookmark system can also be used to mark out 'first play' tracks, allowing it to double-up as markers for the start of each album.

Accessories

Rio also bundles a plastic belt clip with the Chiba. It's not only very basic - just a plastic holder with a metal clip attached - but because the earphone port is on the bottom of the player, you have to connect it through a hole in the holster. For some bizarre reason, it didn't occur to Digital Networks to design the holster in such a way as to allow you to remove the player while the 'phones are attached.

There's an alkaline battery bundled too. Digital Networks claims you get 18 hours' of continuous playback from a single cell, and our intense but non-continuous usage over a period of several days suggests that's about right.

Verdict

We liked the Rio Chiba. Its compact size, looks and feature set - particularly the FM radio and the good, customisable equaliser - make it a real pleasure to use. So does its responsive, easy-to-navigate UI.

While the Chiba's sound quality is generally very good, the noise that leaks into the audio system at high volumes and during power-on and -off is a disappointment, and the player loses rating points as result. Fortunately, it doesn't get in the way of the music and it's not even audible unless the volume is turned way up loud. But it's nonetheless a sign of sloppiness on Digital Networks' part. This is not an issue we've experienced with other players of comparable type, but we did notice it again on the Rio Fuse, which we'll be reviewing shortly. So it's clearly a design issue and not a one-off glitch with our evalution unit.

Chiba's strong cross-platform support - a rare commodity in the world of portable digital music players - helps compensate for the noise issue. All that's missing is Linux and Ogg Vorbis support.

But it's the joystick control that make the Chiba stand out. It's a novel approach, and one that is genuinely better than the accepted standard, the jog wheel. It will be copied, of course, but Digital Networks deserves credit for offering it first. ®

Digital Networks Rio Chiba 256MB
Rating 75%
Pros — Superb joystick control system
— Good price
— Stylish looks
— Cross-platform software support
Cons — Background noise at high volumes
— Adding memory cards is tricky
— The el cheapo belt clip
Price $200
More info The Rio Chiba web site

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