The Rio PMP300 is in effect a prototype of these future digital devices.
Once home, the device could be emptied into a PC and the content routed to the appropriate digital playback device, whether it is a digital stereo, a digital television or an electronic book. Paving the way for lightning-fast digital downloads.
The music, or other digital content, might be downloaded into a portable music player like the Rio, or into a digital camera, or a smart cellular phone, or a PC smart card, or a palm-size PC or any other small digital device that has storageĬapabilities and standard digital interfaces.
In malls, it might be possible to buy and download a song, an album, an audio book, an electronic textbook, a piece of sheet music - anything that can be digitized and delivered over a computer network - in less than a minute.
Where is this leading us? On the fastest Internet connections, the kind that record stores and companies like might some day maintain in kiosks MP3 music on the Rio sounds better than FM radio. MP3 music is often described as "near CD quality." Some people, whom I suspect were terriers in their previous lives, can discern the subtle differences between "near" CD quality and CD quality, but most normal humans cannot. Get faster, music downloads that once took hours will be compressed to minutes, and minutes to seconds. MP3 allows a 40-megabyte song to be compressed to 4 megabytes or less, so it can be transferred in one-tenth the time. These devices will evolve quickly, as will the technical standards, so cautious consumers may want to waitįor the chorus before plunking down a couple of C-notes.Ĭompression is very important for the Rio, and indeed for music distribution over the Internet. Quickly become an alternative to portable cassette or CD players, and that would further strengthen MP3's role at the desktop. The Rio is the first and so far only portable MP3 player, so there is a lot of pent-up demand for it among MP3 fans, especially young people who are already using their computers as alternatives to dorm-room stereos. MP3 allows big audio files to be condensed to about one-tenth their size without significantly harming the music quality. It will eventually be replaced by something better, but for now, MP3 is the Internet softwareĭu jour. MP3, whose formal technical name is MPEG Level 3, is emerging as the most popular format for storing music on computer hard disks and on the Internet. It goes in one virtual ear and out the other. But with a few exceptions, the music is transient.
More than 40 million copies of a free program called Real Player have been downloaded from Real Networks (to enable Web users to listen to music and radio broadcasts "streaming" through their computers. There is nothing new about music on the Internet, of course. The catalyst is a compression formula called MP3, which is the basis of the $199.95 Rio player, from Diamond Multimedia, and the music industry's sudden intense interest Having seen computer nerds dancing at their company parties, I can say with little fear of contradiction that as dancers, they are very giftedīut these computer programmers are transforming the music industry. We can all be grateful that Internet music is a new distribution system, not a new musical genre.
HE Diamond Rio PMP300 personal music player, one of the most significant new products to appear in 1998, comes in a box that promises "Internet music