Well, got back from some 20 hours of travel time over the Thanksgiving holiday. Flew from Austin, TX to Houston, TX to New York, NY, then took the train from Port Jefferson, NY to New York, NY to Washington, DC, and then flew from there to Chicago, IL to Austin, all to test out the Karma in these most rugged of conditions!

I re-ripped all my CDs to Vorbis over the course of a couple of days using the Rio software, and converted my iTMS music to FLAC using other stuff. It was fast and easy, and I have no complaints. The UI is a little weird, but once you figure it out, you're okay. It'd be nice to actually say what quality level each Vorbis setting is (is "best" 5, or 6? 6 would be nice for the discrete stereo).

Battery life and physical usability was great. The player finally crapped out about halfway through the flight from Chicago to Austin, after easily fourteen hours of travel time. The nipple and the wheel and the lock were all easily manipulable without me paying much attention. The unit was plenty loud, although my noise-cancelling headphones probably helped a bit, there, and I didn't try it without them.

Complaints? I'd like to see Replay Gain tag support in both the Rio software and on the Karma. Having to turn the volume up and down sucks, and having to run VorbisGain on all my freshly ripped audio files also sucked.

I'd also like a few preset auto-generated playlists. Like "Play All Music" and "Play All Music Shuffled", since switching shuffle on and off is awkward going through all the menus, and having fresh rips means I didn't have any playlists at all.

It might also be nice to have an option to shut the LCD off entirely after a few minutes. Could save a little battery life, and on a long trip where you pick a playlist and stick with it (and aren't staring at the screen), you don't need it scrolling the song titles forever.

I'd also like some sort of case or screen protector. It's pretty scratched up now, and it was almost exclusively in the pockets of my cargo pants. Not exactly the roughest of containers.

Now all I need is a couple extra docks and AC adapters, a remote, and an aux input for my car stereo.

I'd also like a few preset auto-generated playlists. Like "Play All Music" and "Play All Music Shuffled", since switching shuffle on and off is awkward going through all the menus, and having fresh rips means I didn't have any playlists at all.

There's a "Play All" thing in Rio DJ, though I kind of agree that's not an obvious place to look for it.

Peter

Nice post! Spare AC adapters are available, although not from Rio. HTH.

-Zeke

did you get that much playtime with ogg files?

I wasn't keeping exact track (I suppose I could go look up arrival and depature times), but counting on my fingers gives me about 14 hours. Could be as low as 13, I suppose, because I had the unit shut off during takeoffs and landings, and the regular on-off-on-off could have hurt my numbers. But then, I also listened to it while waiting around the airport, so it probably evens out. Either way, I found it satisfactory, and knowing not to expect more than 15 made the loss of music during my last leg not unexpected.

I assume you're referring to that post about Vorbis and FLAC having poorer battery life than MP3? I wonder why that is. FLAC I can understand; larger files mean having to spin up the HD more, but I didn't care because I only have a few dozen FLAC files. But theKompany's music player for the Sharp Zaurus gets better battery life, not worse, when playing Vorbis over MP3, due to lower CPU usage. I wonder why the Karma does poorer.

It was my understanding that Ogg files require more CPU power to decode than MP3 files. Perhaps one of the Cambridge guys will chime in here and clarify this.

It was my understanding that Ogg files require more CPU power to decode than MP3 files. Perhaps one of the Cambridge guys will chime in here and clarify this.

In our codebase we have a really good ARM MP3 decoder and only a fairly good ARM Vorbis decoder. Perhaps Sharp have it the other way round. AIUI there's not much inherent difference in complexity between MP3 decoding and Vorbis decoding, except for really high-bitrate Vorbis files.

Peter

Okay, then I must have had it wrong.

<Gilda Radner>Never mind.</Gilda Radner>