whither the rio? what can be done?

The availability of new Rios through retailers is soon to be no more. Those few left will fetch a premium leaving eBay as the sole source for obtaining a (used) unit at a reasonable price.

Is there any realistic chance that SonicBlue will put the Rios back into production, or better yet, revisit the design and release a "Rio II" with a better display, built-in 802.11b wireless, and perhaps other spiffy features as well?

I haven't seen any indications that this might happen. The Rio for all practical purposes appears to be a dead product.

Which is a shame, because for all its shortcomings it's fundamentally a good design that can be built upon to do wonderful things that competing products (Audiotron, e.g.) can't do, such as natively supporting heterogeneous collections of music, lossless codecs, web-based control and direct streaming.

For there to be any chance of a new Rio, it seems to me that SonicBlue must be made aware of the enthusiasm that exists.

The question is, how to go about doing this?

--Reed http://jreceiver.sourceforge.net

Of course there's a realistic chance

Rob

Really? This press release would suggest otherwise ...

http://www.sonicblue.com/company/press.asp?ID=565

Hmmm... wasn't the group that developed the Rio Receiver based in Cambridge though? No mention of them being reduced... Of course I could have things confused.

Not sure what that has to do with anything - its an operational issue and doesn't affect brand strategy.

The Receiver was developed in Cambridge, which is where all Rio audio software development happens now (and has for a while).

Rob

That that existing design will go back into production, or that there will be a successor?

The latter is preferable, but the former would still be great.

Another question: who is the best person to contact at SonicBlue who is in a position to get this process moving forward?

Reed http://jreceiver.sourceforge.net

That that existing design will go back into production, or that there will be a successor?

I don't think there would be much point remaking the existing design. There are so many cool new things that could be added these days..

who is the best person to contact at SonicBlue who is in a position to get this process moving forward?

Hugo. But he already knows.

We're one team, and we have many products to develop. I think you'll see a steady stream of them hitting the market, starting real soon now.

Rob

For the price of a used RIO Receiver I can get a low-end TiVo these days. Maybe it could make a nice follow on to the Rio Receiver, and it also comes with a bunch of diskspace to hold tons of Audio.

Has anyone added Rio Receiver likes features to a TiVo?

Regarding using the Tivo as a Rio-like audio player, here's my analysis from last March:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=653185&forum_id=110068

Summary: it'd be of little use for hosting audio, but could be a streaming client using mpeg-2 or lightweight codecs.

Somebody may have already done this, but I haven't looked into it.

Reed http://jreceiver.sourceforge.net

That is a nice writeup. I didn't realize that the series1 TiVo's PowerPC ran at 50MHz. I thought it was 60 or 70. Not sure how a PowerPC compares to the ARM processor used in the RIO Receiver.

That's good to hear - but will they be hitting the market in the UK? At the moment the only ones that seem to be available over here are the Audiotron and the SliMP3, neither of which fill me with a great deal of enthusiasm.

Don't suppose you're prepared to give any hints at all, about either what the products are or when we'll be able to get our greasy little mitts on them..?

Bryan.

My guess is it would hit the UK before anywhere else, but then again, SonicBlue may play a heavy hand on the Cambridge guys.

Or, you could drive down to Cambridge, buy the guys a few rounds of drinks and maybe they'll let you see a new gadget first hand ;-)

Greg