A few more pieces have to fall in place -- some work I have to do to parse the flac metadata for jrec -- but soon we can start spreading the word of how we turned a focus-group-inspired mp3 player into sophisticated high-fidelity audio equipment.

I have a decent amount of work to do on the player yet before it's ready for release also, but it's really nice to at least know that it will work. As well as cleaning up my player and stabilizing it, I have to wait for the next release of FLAC before I can "officially" include it in mine. Apparently I discovered a bug that was causing FLAC to allocate almost 2 megs for one struct! Obviously that wouldn't work on the Rio. The author of FLAC sent me a quick fix to try and it worked great, but he asked me not to release that anywhere as I guess it's a bit of a hack. It's cool to see all these projects coming together so nicely and working together (MAD, FLAC, RRR, Rioplay, JRec, and hopefully OGG at some point).

And no small thanks go to the guys who designed the Rio hardware to be much more than it could be.

I couldn't agree with this more. The Rio is an awesome little piece of hardware. Of course they also deserve a big thanks for basing it on open-source technologies and releasing all kinds of information about it that they didn't have to.