cassiusdrow | 400 CDs in the palm of my hand.....

anathemad gave me a Rio Karma for Giftmas.

Technobabble behind the cut
It is a 20GB hard drive based Digital Music Player. It will play MP3s, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and Windows Media files. It has a docking station with an ethernet network port and RCA Audio line outs. It supports USB 2.0 (400MB/sec) and 10/100Mb Ethernet file transfers. It reads ID3v2 tags as well as Vorbis comments. It is a tag-based player so you pick by Artist, Album, Track Name, Genre, etc., not by a static folder layout.

I ripped my 400+ CDs to 128bit MP3 almost 3 years ago in anticipation of buying an MP3 player like this. This is the first one that impressed me enough to want to buy it. I don't like the iPod - it's just way too overpriced and Apple has no interest in supporting any format besides MP3, AAC, and WMA. Now that I have a player that supports Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, I plan to re-rip the CDs to FLAC, which is a lossless format. This will give me a perfect copy of the CD at about 50% of the disc space. Then I can encode from FLAC to Ogg Vorbis for use on the Karma, or any other format I might want in the future. And I might even keep the MP3s if I decide to use the TiVo's MP3 player service.

I am in awe of this thing. I can carry my entire CD collection around with me. I plan to connect it's docking station to my stereo to play/sync/charge when home. When in the car it's connected to my car stereo's inputs. And headphones while I'm at work. I am now wired for sound. How I wish I had had this when I was on the train for 4 hours a day.