On-fire MP3 still needs tune-up

The popularity of MP3 — the premier Music Service Provider (MSP) allowing consumers to instantly discover, purchase, listen to, store and organize their music collection from anywhere, at anytime, using any Internet device — has grown by leaps and bounds since it was released in 1997.

Now that people can download any music they want, they wanted to be able to play it on the go, too. Laptops, although portable, are cumbersome on rollerblades or in a spinning class.

Last year’s unshackling of the format came in the shape of portable players that are much more skater-friendly. In the year that has followed, more than a dozen Walkmanlike options have emerged for the MP3 aficionado.

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The Diamond Multimedia Rio 500 and the Nomad 64 by Creative Labs have garnered the most attention in this increasingly crowded marketplace. RCA recently entered the fray with its lower-priced Lyra, which has yet to grab as much user-endorsement as the Rio and the Nomad. All three players are widely available, at both brick-and-mortar electronics stores (such as Boulder’s Circuit City) and on the Net, at a plethora of e-commerce sites.

The foremost consideration for any MP3 player is system compatibility. Stand-alone items they aren’t; without a decent computer, one might be better off sticking to CDs and tapes. Of the Lyra, Rio and Nomad, only the Rio is Mac-compatible. The requirements for the Lyra are a bit more than the other two — it needs 32 megabytes of RAM, a Pentium 166-megahertz processor, a CD-ROM drive and a full duplex sound card.

System requirements aside, the most important factors that should be considered before buying an MP3 player are how and where it is going to be used. For instance, the gym demands resiliency, whereas the airplane calls for more memory and battery life.

“The reason I bought the Nomad was it held more” than the earlier Rio designs, said Dan Sturman, a Denver resident who purchased the player in the spring of ’99 and primarily uses it while at work. Sturman added that the Nomad’s parallel port system is another strong suit. Its main downside, he said, is that it doesn’t clip onto a belt that sturdily, a potential kiss of death for gym rats and joggers.

Seattle-based John Hedtke, author of 1999’s “MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution,” compared the Nomad 64 and the Rio 500, which he described as being “the same level, same memory, same price point.”

Special features are what separate the two players in Hedtke’s mind. “The Rio 500 does not let you record digital audio. You can’t use it as a little pocket recorder,” he noted. While it can hold 32 hours of speech, the Rio 500 doesn’t have a built-in microphone that the Nomad 64 features alongside its four hours of voice memory. “The biggest difference between the Nomad and the Rio 500 is that the Nomad has a built-in FM radio. And that’s cool.”

Both the Nomad and the Rio come with 64 megabytes of internal memory, which equates to roughly two hours of music. The port system of the Rio, unlike Nomad’s parallel setup, is via the faster USB; the next-generation Nomad will also be USB-based.

Hedtke commended the Nomad’s durability, an aspect of the Rio that others have disparaged. “In a hands-down price performance comparison, the Nomad wins, simply because of the FM radio,” he said, “but they’re both really worthy units.”

Bruce Wolfe, a College Park, Md., resident and Rio 500 owner, said his opinion of the unit has steadily declined since he bought it earlier this year. “The software is dreadful,” he said. “It goes off-line all the time. There’s no reason something that’s supposed to be so simple be so complex.”

In terms of price, both the Rio and the Nomad can be had for as little as $230 online, but the Nomad tends be a shade more expensive. The RCA Lyra retails for $175 to $200, but its memory — based on CompactFlash cards rather than the more ubiquitous SmartMedia — has a lower capacity than the Rio or the Nomad at the present. Additionally, the Lyra, like the Rio, lacks the Nomad’s built-in goodies of a microphone and an FM radio.

There is a wealth of online information on portable MP3 players, including reviews, specifications and price lists. For the would-be buyer, the hardware links at Error! Bookmark not defined. and Error! Bookmark not defined. provide excellent starting points for researching portable units.