Rio PMP300

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The Rio PMP-300 portable mp3 player. The top view shows the face of the player. The bottom view shows the edge of the player (including its proprietary connector) and the included parallel-port adaptor.

The Rio PMP300 was the second portable consumer MP3 digital audio player (portable digital audio player), and was produced by Diamond Multimedia. It shipped in 1998 but not without controversy.

1 Features
2 Legal significance
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Features

Roughly the shape of a deck of cards (3.5 inches by 2.5 inches and 0.625 inches thick) it was black and had an LCD screen and a circular pad with control buttons. It had controls for skipping tracks forwards or backwards, repeat, random play and for four preset equalizer settings. The LCD displayed the track number being played, but did not display artist or title information. It could play MP2 and MP3 format audio files, and had support for a variety of bit-rates and had MP3 variable-bitrate (VBR) support.

It shipped with 32 Mbytes of internal memory and had a SmartMedia slot, allowing users to add additional memory (up to another 32Mbytes - larger cards are not recognized by the Rio's firmware). It was powered by a single AA battery which provided between 8 and 12 hours of playback time. Connection to a personal computer was through the computer's parallel port, with a proprietary connector on the Rio's edge.

The Rio retailed for US $200, which made it quite expensive for the ability to play a dozen or so songs. An even more expensive version was later released, and was colored translucent green and equipped with a larger 64 Mbyte internal memory, though all of this came at a higher cost of $250.

Diamond no longer provides support for the Rio, and Diamond's Rio software doesn't work on later versions of Microsoft Windows, particularly Windows XP. Consequently owners wanting to keep their Rio working use independently produced freeware programs such as "Dreaming of Brazil" to upload audio files to the player. Similarly, limited Linux command-line based support for the Rio is provided by the rioutils package.

[edit] Legal significance

In October 1998, the American recording industry group, the Recording Industry Association of America, filed a lawsuit in the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco claiming the player violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act. The three judge panel ruled in favor of Diamond, paving the way for the development of the MP3 portable player market. [1]