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The first wave of MP3 portables failed to capture the interest of some consumers because they simply did not have enough storage capacity. Now, products using alternative storage media are hot tickets in the market - simply because people want to be able to bring MORE music with them. When CD MP3 portables first arrived, they did so with much fanfare, but then interest in those players soon waned because of problems with skipping discs, poor support for various disc types, and lack of functionality. The Riovolt suffers from none of these, and is in fact one of the most fully-featured and well received players to hit the market.

Meet the Riovolt

Designed with a futuristic flare, the Riovolt is sleek in its silver and blue colour scheme. The main controls are all located on the top face of the player. Arrayed around the backlit 2-line LCD display are controls for song navigation, EQ settings, play mode, volume control, navigation menu, and more.

The package contents include a thin carrying case, an 8 function inline remote, and matching earphones. The remote offers most of the primary functionality of the main unit including song navigation, EQ settings and digital volume control.

SONICblue's specs state that the player can go for 15hours on a pair of fresh AA batteries and we had no problems hitting 12+ hours with a pair of batteries.

Features Galore

What sets the Riovolt apart from other players is SONICblue's dedication to packing in the most features. The player supports both MP3 and WMA formats, and easily reads CD-R, CD-RW, and CD-Audio discs without problems. If new formats become standard, SONICblue can easily upgrade the Riovolt via a firmware update. Upgrading the firmware is as easy as burning a disc with the upgrade file in the root directory. Pop the disc in, and the player self-installs the firmware.

As of the time of writing, SONICblue has already released two firmware updates that bring bugfixes, improvements, and new features to the player. Our shipping sample had the basic firmware v1.0 installed. The newest firmware, version 2.0, is what we used for testing.

The Riovolt has some very convenient and powerful features. So far it is the only player I've seen that has true directory support with ID3 tag readouts - this means that you can create a disc and store all your files in their respective subdirectories, and when you use that disc in the Riovolt, you will be able to browse through subdirectories and read track names while you browse.

The player also has a very robust anti-skip system in place. Songs are not played directly off the disc. Instead, the player will load up 120 seconds of the current song into its RAM and play from there. The disc does not actually spin during playback. Instead, it will spin up only to read and load portions of a song into memory. The skip buffer is user configured to either 30 or 60seconds of anti-skip protection with the latter consuming more battery life.