Diamond Rio PMP300

If you ever hoped that the future would promise more than just small black boxes, the new Diamond Rio will only confirm your fears. This portable music device caused several heads to turn in the PC Pro office, but it's caused even more fuss in the recording industry. The reason behind the furore is the fact that the Rio plays MP3, a music compression format that over the past few years has taken the Internet by storm. Derived from the original MPEG standard - MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 - MP3 will, depending on the compression ratio, squash a four-minute track down into approximately 3.5 to 4Mb.

One company that is unlikely to be making an MP3 player in the near future is Sony, the inventor of MiniDisc (MD), which is the emerging digital audio recording standard. The Rio is both lighter and smaller than most MD players, however, and has the additional advantage of containing no moving parts. This means you can literally trampoline with the thing and, unlike CD or MD, the music won't skip a beat. The Rio also exerts less of a power drain than laser-based products, yielding a claimed 12 hours from a single alkaline battery.

However, there are a number of issues with the Rio. First, its plastic casing feels insubstantial and flimsy. Second, to get any music onto it, it has to be tethered to a PC, and once it's on that's it - MP3 files can't be moved, they can only be deleted. The third issue concerns obtaining tracks in the MP3 format. One method is known as 'ripping', which involves encoding your own CD tracks into MP3, and is entirely legal for personal use. The Rio does come with software for this task, and although it works well it isn't very intuitive.

In addition, it's heavy on the processor and even more so on the CD-ROM drive. In fact, I tested it on a Pentium/166 system with a 16-speed drive and found it was unable to stream the digital audio continuously for the length of the track, resulting in skips and popping effects in the encoded track. On a Pentium/200 MMX with a 24-speed drive, however, I didn't experience any problems at all.

The alternative is to download files directly from the Internet, and it's this that has caused all of the controversy. The presence of copyrighted music on the Internet in MP3 format has been at the centre of a major battle. Since it's so easy to 'rip' songs into such small files, the temptation to post them on Web pages is, for many, too hard to resist. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has spent a lot of time and effort shutting down sites, but it's still relatively easy to find working links to MP3s of popular songs.

Legal sites such as www.mp3.com/ contain hundreds of legal MP3 files, but the caveat is they're mostly of unknown artists looking for free publicity. Some major artists have sought to promote their music over the Internet using MP3, but this has inevitably been met with opposition. For example, after posting samples of new tracks on the group's Web site, rapper Chuck D faced the wrath of his record company; he claimed the company was 'running scared from a technology that evens out the creative field'.

Another problem that concerns the RIAA is MP3's lack of the SCMS (serial copy management system) found in CD and MD, which prevents a digital copy being made more than once. No such restrictions are present in MP3, and the lack of physical media means there's no way for record companies to recover lost royalties incurred through piracy.

As far as the consumer is concerned, though, all these problems come second best to the fundamental issue of sound quality. For a start, the headphones are unimpressive, producing an insubstantial and thin sound that's severely lacking in bass response. Even after changing over to a better pair, the MP3 files stored on the Rio sounded merely average when compared to CD or MD. It was several years before audiophiles warmed to the ATRAC encoding of MD, so MP3 is unlikely to gain acceptance quickly. However, in its favour, you will be able to flash-update the Rio as superior formats such as AAC (which is part of the MPEG-2 standard) become available.