Detailed Rio Karma MP3 Player Description & Review

Rio: Karma £279.00inc. VAT  &  Delivery

As this player is no longer available we suggest you look at this player instead.

The Rio Karma 20GB. It's a beauty. Look at it there. It's about the same size as the Creative MuVo squared (not to mention a surprisingly similar shape), but it has 20GB of space instead of 4GB (max) for not a lot more money.

Another very surprising similarity is that even with 20GB of storage space, someone at Rio has seen fit to claim that you can store and play twice as many WMA files as you can MP3. This is completely unnecessary and the sort of thing that give marketing people a bad name. Lying does not improve your case for making a sale and just because everyone else is doing it only means you are at best misguided.

The obvious lie is a shame because this is a great Jukebox. 3 very good types of compressed music format catered for: MP3, WMA and Ogg Vorbis. Hallelujah. Fans of the Ogg format have been clamoring for years for someone to "please, please, please make a jukebox that plays our favourite music files". It has only taken about 3 years but now there are some jukeboxes that will handle the (in the opinion of many consumers, notably superior) Ogg format and the Rio Karma jukebox is one of them.

The screen is capable of some fancy-footwork, including 'visualization'. What this means, in simple terms, is that you can look at graphics on the screen instead of just text. Some of the graphics are even animated.

Using the Karma is as simple as you would come to expect from a Jukebox. Dynamic playlist generation, auto sync between your PC and jukebox, etc. There is even an auto DJ function that will automatically select tunes for you (based on things like artist/ genre/ other specialised information) put them in a playlist and mix the tunes together for you. Nice.

What else can we say that is bad about the Rio Karma?

The Rio Karma comes with a docking station for speedy connection to your computer. The Karma's docking station is able to connect (via included cabling) to your home stereo, so you can blast your neighbors out of it if you have a nice home system.

It doesn't end there because on the Rio Karma's docking station there is also an Ethernet connection so that you can connect to other computers over a network - very nice. What this means is that you can transfer music to or from any PC on your network.

Battery news

Batteries are included. They are Internal rechargeable Li-ion battery type. The battery will also hold about 14 hours of charge, which is quite respectable.

If you want a stylish, small, light, powerful MP3, WMA and Ogg player with plenty of battery time then the Rio Karma is a beaut.