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THE RIO PORTABLE MUSIC PLAYER

Matthew Green from The House of Synergy talks to Greg Melvill - Smith about the Rio Portable Music Player.

The Portable MP3 player is the first of its kind and is now available in South Africa.

MP3 is a file format, like "gif" is for images or "doc" is for word processor files. In this case we are dealing with sound files, so it is called "music_file.mp3". Normally files stored on CD's or computers are in a format other than MP3. The MP3 format takes the existing file and "squeezes" it into a smaller file - resulting in compression. Typically compression ratios are between 10:1 and 12:1

Compression works by "deleting" the audio frequencies that the human ear cannot hear with the result that the file sounds identical to the original but occupies a smaller space.

If, for example, you took a 3.5 minute song from your CD and copied it to your computer you would end up with a 35 mb sized wave file. Using the MP3 compression that 35mb file is reduced to about 3.5 mb.

The Rio comes standard with 32MB of RAM. This equates to an average of 8 or 10 songs. You could load fewer songs if they were long songs or if the quality of compression is high. High quality compression means the MP3 sounds very much like the original file, low quality compression means a smaller but inferior sounding files. Given that the MP3 compression rate is about 12:1 you could fit about 35 minutes of music on the standard player (one without extra memory)

The unit come standard with a flash menu which is where the MP3 is stored .There are no moving parts so if you enjoy going to the gym for instance and you bounce and run around, it won't skip sound on the track.

It comes with a built in 4 setting graphic equaliser and depending on the style of music, be it jazz or rock, you could obviously change the tone setting

The MP3 Player is designed for you take your own CD music and convert it to the MP3 format. Or you could download legitimate, authorised music from the Internet that has MP3 sound.