The Diamond Rio Mp3 Player

As everybody knows, the computer development goes on with the speed of lightning. That is also the situation for software. Last year a new algorithm called Mp3 was introduced. It means was to compress music. That means that it would take music from, for example a compact disc (CD) and compress the information so it would only take up a fraction of the original size with almost the same quality. How does it work? It removes all sound that is impossible for the ear to perceive. That is very low and very high tones. Now the music-file is in a comfortable size to swiftly transfer via e.g. the Internet. A song takes approximately 10 minutes to download with a standard modem, faster with a direct connection. Because of this fact Mp3 music files is spread widely across the net. A search for Mp3 on the Altavista search engine will render nearly 2.000.000 matches. The only bad thing is that it’s illegal due to copyright regulations to have a Mp3 file on your computer if you don’t own the album.

Until just now Mp3 files have been locked to computers. But in a few days Diamond Multimediaâ will release their new portable Mp3 player called Rio. It’s a small device about the size of a normal music cassette, weighing about 70 grams allowing you to transfer files from your computer. Thanks to the compression you will be able to store 1 hour (32 MB) of music in the player’s memory. There will also be 1-hour exchangeable memory cards available. You just swap the card in the player and there you go – another hour of music.

It’s not only the size that favours this thing. It’s also the "skip protection", how much you can shake the player until it stops playing. Everybody who has tried to go running with a portable CD player knows that it skips all the time and a Walkman makes other funny noises. The Mp3 player is as skip safe as a portable radio. That’s because it has got no moving parts.

Now you might think that this little magic machine has no disadvantages. It does have several, for example the price. In the US it will be priced at $199 for the time of introduction. Hopefully the price will go down as fast as other computer-related products do. An other big question is the compatibility. If the development in computers goes on, there will probably be another much better music format available in short. As a matter of fact the company who released Mp3 has already announced a new format called Mp4. Go to Diamond Multimedia's homepage.