Karma in Stores now

According to best buy, some stores are showing in stock of the Karma now

b

Um, that would be a neat trick!

i was droolin, so i called one of the stores that were showing in stock, and the guy in the computer department said they didnt come in yet, despite what the web site says.
hmm, i wonder if they could be in the back somewhere!
also went to a local best buy here in fla.. just the tag, nothin else.. but i did see the nitrus, and all i gotta say is WOW! that thing is tiny! much smaller than i thought it was, if it was cheaper, id definately buy one. it should be $199 not $299.

b

Just called my local best buy here in houston and they said that they have it in stock, but they can't release it until Tuesday.... interesting...

The web site shows my Best Buy also having it in stock, but the store doesn't actually have it in stock. So apparently the web site's database is not in sync with the store's database.

I broke down and bought a nitrus, 300 is a bit pricey but it is a really cool player. The only questions I have is does it support flac (pointless i know) , is there a voladjust or equivalent, and how to get Rio Music manager to stop crashing when you load a huge directory?

There have been some fun times at Best Buys in the last week with the newly released Canon 300D camera. Lots of reports of people having to force Best Buy employees to search through the stock room (or where ever) to track down newly arrive stock that had "gone missing". Also lots of stores denying having it in stock over the phone, but it being sat on the shelf when people actually take a trip to the store...

how to get Rio Music manager to stop crashing when you load a huge directory?

Don't know what version of RMM you're running, but if it's an older version than the one we're testing for the Karma, it sometimes has the problem of appearing to lock up (no response on screen) even though all it's doing is indexing the disk and taking a long time.

If it's genuinely crashing, it might be because of a corrupt file (or a file with bad or nostandard tag data) somewhere in the directory tree. Try loading only subsets instead of the entire tree and attempt to narrow down, via the divide-and-conquer method, which file is giving it grief. Maybe even save off the offending file so you can show it to the Cambridge guys and they can fix the problem on a future release.

it happens in version 2.10, 2.20, on win2000, 98 . I have tried to add indivudual directories and it seems like after some amount it just doesnt like it and will crash. By crash I mean the program generates an error and then will exit automaitcally. The only way to fix it in win2000 is to edit the registry and remove some of the directories.

Hmm, haven't seen that one, then. How many files are we talking about?

Sounds more like the importer crashing on a file it doesn't like. Unfortunately the only way to track that down is to divide and conquer the media library. If you find the track please let me know and we'll work out what the problem is.

Rob

how about if i have non music files in there like m3u or images, does it ignore non music files?

As in having a built in Rio Taxi system? Yes.

I think he means, does the importer in RMM have problems if you point it to a directory with non-music files.

Eliceo, do you know what Rob and I mean by "divide and conquer"?

I think so. I am also pretty lazy and like most people look for quick fixes. The thought of trying to isolate a particular file or directory sounds pretty time consuming, although I have some idea where to start. I actually started doing this the other day. Unfortuanately on win2000 the program completely exits (only fix is to edit it out of the registry). In Win98 the program will display an error dialog box and then you can still open up options and delete offending directories.

should this problem be in another message thread?

too late to worry about your thread being hijacked.

> As in having a built in Rio Taxi system? Yes.

Can the Karma do the same thing? And if so and you are transferring non-music files, do you need to install any drivers or programs first, or can I just plug the Karma into any random computer and go?

And if so and you are transferring non-music files, do you need to install any drivers or programs first, or can I just plug the Karma into any random computer and go?

To transfer files between the Karma and the computer, you need the Rio Taxi application, which is separate from Rio Music Manager (but is installed at the same time).

If you do not have Rio Music Manager on the aforementioned random computer, but you happen to have ethernet, then you can run the Java version of Rio Music Manager Lite which also includes a Java version of Rio Taxi. These files are available via the web server on the player itself, so you don't need to download any software, it's self-contained.

The only drawback I can see is that, in order to use ethernet, you've gotta have the dock present. There's no ethernet plug on the player, only USB2 on the player. The dock has USB2 and ethernet.

Hopefully some company (or Rio) make a ethernet cable with a plug on the end. Kind of like the USB sync cables you get for a PDA

Ahh, that is too bad. Ok, thanks Tony.

There was discussion of making an ethernet dongle for the player. I can see how that would be a useful thing if you were trying to taxi files to a Mac and didn't want to bring the dock.

But I have to say, the dock is smaller and lighter than the player itself and easy to take with you if you know you're going to need to taxi files to a Mac or a PC without USB. The only time I'd see needing an ethernet dongle is when you're in a place where you need the ethernet connection unexpectedly. But in that case, you wouldn't have the dongle either.

Tony,
Does using the dock for ethernet only (not charging) require the use of a wall wart?

-Zeke

No, the wall wart is not required for the dock to function. But if you don't have the wall wart plugged in, using the dock drains the battery much much faster.

So you can't expect to take the dock to a long download session without the wall wart. But for a quick file transfer, then yeah, I think you can do that.

There's also the slight drawback in that the ethernet appears to operate at sub-megabit speeds..

Cheers

Your presence reminded me: are there non-Windows drivers/utilities for the Karma, et al.? (We need a collective name for them.)

The only non-windows stuff for the Karma right now is Mike Schrag's "Rio Music Manager Lite" and "Rio Taxi Lite". They only work on ethernet.

And to counter Mark's comment about slow ethernet speed: The dot-release that will be available soon, should theoretically improve ethernet speeds quite significatnly. But at the moment, yeah, ethernet is kinda slow (took overnight to fill my player) and USB2 is hella fast (fills the player in a surprisingly short time, IIRC something like an hour or less).

Yup, gotta luv the USB2 -- a song a second download speed (fast!).

>are there non-Windows drivers/utilities for the Karma, et al.?

Nothing that's usable at present. Perhaps soon, though.
I've only had a working Karma for about a week total (since June), so I haven't been able to influence very much about it yet.

Cheers

That's a week more than most of us. Slacker.

Okay, I take that all back now.

It's clumsy, but can be made to work.

(1) first, download the rmml.zip file from the Karma's built-in web server.
(2) "unzip rmml.zip"
(3) Install the Sun Java JRE.
(4) "java -jar rmmlite.jar"

And.. presto! Everything the win32 folks have (almost) is now there. Except rip and encode, of course.

Cheers

So who's going 2 review this thing?

Anyone bought one yet?

Well... If I could actually get one I'd review it... Hey... Donations... I'm accepting donations so I can get a Karma... Anybody? Oh well, worth a try

Hopefully a post-release build will get the applet version back in business ... It's very cool to see it launch off the webserver.

Is there a way for me to reinstall mine without the silly .zip wrapper?

Cheers

Direct all protests to the zip file to [email protected] . I'm totally on the anti-zip file bandwagon with you.

check your email ..

I'm totally on the anti-zip file bandwagon with you.

What is the point of zipping a compressed file anyway (jars are already zipped by default)? Does windows not like jars or something?

Windows likes them fine -- The reasoning so far has been both the desire to compress it (which I'm pretty sure it doesn't since I'm jarring it with compression anyway) and also so that the readme file is bundled with it. Hopefully we'll get the applet launching problems fixed up soon and we'll be back in business and this pain will be behind us

Yeah. The readme.txt file didn't help me at all, so no loss there. Or I suppose one might add the critical command to it for Linux: java -jar rmmlite.jar

Once you install the JDK, are you able to double-click the jar file through your window manager? I've never checked this on linux before ... If not, then we definitely need to add that line into the readme.

ms

My window manager helpfully opens the .jar archive for me and allows me to browse its contents. So, yeah, the required command would probably be useful in the readme file.

Now that I know the command, I can easily add a desktop icon to issue it.

Cheers

Hmm. Sounds like an ideal candidate for binfmt_misc.

The readme.txt file didn't help me at all, so no loss there. Or I suppose one might add the critical command to it for Linux: java -jar rmmlite.jar

Done. Also removed from Zip (which makes it - and hence upgrade files - 100K larger).

Rob

Interesting note on the size increase ... I'll check to see if I can specify a compression setting on the jar command and get it down a little smaller.

Interesting note on the size increase ... I'll check to see if I can specify a compression setting on the jar command and get it down a little smaller.

You can't with Sun's jar command AFAIK, but there are some third party tools out there that will let you create a more compressed jar that should still be fully compatible. A google search turned up a few things when I was looking into this a while back.

-Mike

FWIW, I recompressed the jemplode.jar that comes with 2.0b13 with zip -9 and I got an additional 1.5kB reduction, but then zipping that reduced it by about another 150kB. This is likely because it it much more efficient to compress one big file than multiple small ones, which is how zip works, unfortunately. It does provide for much easier random access to the archived files, though.

Okay guys just paid off a ship in LA and managed to get the driver to take me to a best buy on the way to airport.

Know i thought the service in PC world in the uk sucked i have found a whole new level of crappy service.

According to idiot in blue t-shirt

biggest player from rio is 256meg no such thing as the karma despite the fact i managed to find a sticker saying rio Karma on the shelves but sadly no Karma.

He mad numerous attempts to sell me a 20 gig Ipod saying it is the only hard disc player you can buy.

Not impressed

I know for a fact that Best Buys (at least on the East Coast) have the Nitrus, which is both 1.5GB and hard drive-based.

But I suppose that's what you get when you hire high school students and don't bother to train them in any way.

I've just heard that Circuit City are more likely to have Karmas first...

YMMV, obviously!

Hugo

I've got an order in w/Best Buy for one and haven't heard boo yet.

-Zeke

maybe the shipment got hijacked!
call in the feds!

I was looking at an i-Pod because my VIAO notebook has firewire. Have PC-Card USB2.0 cards come down in price yet?

I can get a Cardbus USB2 card for about $25 in the UK so it should be cheaper for you.

Yes, there's been more than a few threads about Bust Buy and their (lack of) customer service.

I refuse to shop there, period. (And their companion stores, "Tweeter". Dunno if they're still around, tho.)

I'm waiting for a 40. Cash is stored away, in a plain white envelope.
Me.