TechoLiO
A plethora of all things technical.

Operation

Using this thing is pretty simple. Install the included rio music manager software, and you're ready to go. In fact you're ready out of the box since some songs are installed on the player. Actually, charge it first for five hours as instructed!

Loading it up

To load in your music, you've got to have all your mp3/ogg/wma ID3 tagged properly. This is because the player doesn't mount like a hard drive nor store files in directories. So the tags are king. Once you're sure of that, you basically plug in the Karma via USB, start the Rio Music Manager and use the synchronize option.

This is a weak point since it really doesn't synchronize. It just puts new files into the unit, with options for deleting karma files only based on running out of space. It would be nice to have full sych options where files no longer on your hard drive go away in the player.

Weaker yet is the fact that if you retag a file, it won't get replaced on the karma. So to clean up tags, you have to delete from the karma and let it synch them back again. This was the biggest pain for me. I'm sure they will improve this, after all, all the files in the karma have time stamps!

I didn't mention the Ethernet dock because I've not gotten it to work with the Music Manager. I had a good connection and in fact could bring up the lone web page in the karma, but the software won't see it. I am told the java based application included (Music Manager Lite) will work with it but I haven't tried yet.

Sound-->