Hmmm. What else is cool about the Karma?...
The Seinnheiser headphones that come with the player are actually really decent! Unlike every other portable player I've seen up until now. They aren't quite as good as the Fontopias at bass, but they have decently smooth highs and are surprisingly warm for earbuds.
Oh, it's got Voladj built-in. Well, it's not Voladj, but it's a similar implementation, entitled "automatic gain control".
Crossfade works nicely.
EQ is five-band parametric. User interface for the EQ is really slick. It also has a "preset" mode with the things I hate "Rock", "Pop", "Jazz" etc., but you can turn those off and just go into the custom EQ modes. So I'm happy.
Rolling the scroll-wheel to FF and RW feels really nice. Works even better than the Seek Tool screen on the empeg. Oh, and it does have a track profile just like the empeg's Seek Tool screen.
Creating playlists in Rio Music Manager is pretty sweet. I have created some very large playlists by doing the following:
- Go into "Albums" view.
- Scroll down the list of albums
- Right-click on an album and say "Add to Playlist". Or drill down into the album, select or multi-select tracks, and rightclick and say "Add to Playlist"
- The first time you add to a playlist, it prompts you for which playlist (or "New")
- Subsequent times you add to playlist, there is a new rightclick option waiting for you: "Add to <playlistname>".
So that way, if you're choosing to quickly build a single large playlist, you can just zip through your list of albums, rightclicking on whatever you want in the playlist. It's very fast and very intuitive.
Rio Music Manager is very slick, and is actually comprised of three programs: RMM itself, Rio Taxi (the file transfer feature), and the internet update wizard.
You can have RMM catalog the music on your hard disk for you (using the "My Music" tab) where it goes by the tag data and organizes artists/albums/genres. Or you can choose the "My Computer" tab and then you've got the familiar Explorer interface pointing to the raw files on your hard disk. Either of those is a valid source for getting files onto the Karma.
RMM does not freeze/block during transfers. It can be in the middle of uploading 10 gigs of files to the player, and you are still free to do anything you would have done before you started the upload. Unlike emplode, all file transfers are handled in a separate little "details" window which queues up all the changes you're making and starts background-processing them. Example: I started uploading 15 gigs of files, then went about building playlists and selecting other tunes to upload.
The "details" window in RMM that shows the in-progress file transfer data can be edited on the fly. Let's say you've chosen to upload 20 albums to the player, and it's going along and churning those files to the player. You can open the details window and see each and every song title in the list as it goes to the player. Every song title is in that window, and next to it it either says "completed", "Transferring xx%", or "Pending". Now here's the fun part. Let's say you realized you don't want album number 17 in that list to be transferred. Scroll down to it (they're all still "pending" down there), group-select the songs, and rightclick and hit "cancel". The text next to those songs changes from "Pending" to "Cancelled" and it skips them when it hits that point in the list.
Ethernet is 100 megabit, of course. I don't know how well it's speed-optimized against USB 2.0 since I don't have a USB 2.0-capable machine to test with. I know that ethernet is faster than USB 1.0, I just don't know how much.
Player is reasonably good with gapless playback on things like Pink Floyd albums. About the same as the car player is right now, maybe slightly better.
Oh, did I mention, you can rip CD's right inside Rio Music Manager? Available formats to rip to are: WMA, MP3, OGG, and FLAC.
