RIO PMP 500 (thing)

I have one of these.

Here are the features from the back of the box, my notes in parentheses:

• - 64 MB onboard memory, expandable to 96 MB (now 128 MB if you upgrade the firmware).
• - Supports Windows and Macintosh.
• - USB Port for blazing fast downloads.
• - Skip free design - no moving parts.
• - Access to rioport.com, the premier site for digital audio content.
• - Automatic bookmarking features for listening to spoken audio.
• - Rio software for encoding, managing MP3 files. (But only encoding files from a CD. And a limited number of times unless you register aka sign up to receive spam.)
• - AudibleManager software for spoken audio content. (Windows 9x only) (blowdart tells me this is for book reading. It uses a smaller range of sound so it is more compressed.)
• - MetaTrust security enabled (Windows 9x only) (blowdart tells me this is part of SDMI from Intertrust)
• - Firmware upgradeable
• - Uses a single AA battery for up to 13 hours continuous play. (My guess is closer to 5)

Here's my real non-bullshit info:

The player itself is very nice, nice backlit LCD display. You can bookmark specific places in a song, good for when you want someone to listen to a song - you can make it go right to the lyrics if it has a long instrumental bit at the start. It can repeat one track, one folder, or everything. The playlist can also be randomized or programmed. The programming is both a pain in the ass to do and worthless - you can easily arrange the playlist on the player from your computer. It has an equalizer with normal, classic, jazz, rock, and custom settings. The backlight can be set to normal (comes on when you press a button), always on, and always off. It has nice browsing abilities. You press on the browse button once and you get a list of the songs in the current folder, press twice for a list of folders, and once more for a list of bookmarks. All the music has to be in folders, which is rather stupid as 64 MB isn't enough for you to need to organize songs this way, and I haven't even been able to figure out how to create a folder, except for a single one when I put the first music on it.

The software can be annoying. The installer doesn't install the drivers needed for it to work, it merely copies them to your hard disk, you need to hope Windows will find them and install them. Choosing which music to put on the player is also annoying. I have to go into a dialog, check the boxes next to the songs I want, and click add items. Then the dialog closes and I can see how much memory the songs will use up, so then I go back into the dialog to add more to fill up the memory or remove a few to get back under the limit, close the dialog again, and click "Copy to portable". It would have been much simpler to have a list of all songs and a list of songs selected for transfer side by side, and simply drag and drop.

All in all, its good. I do have an old version of the software, I am now getting the new version which is hopefully better. If you want to buy one yourself, the current cheapest online retailer I found was www.centralpcs.com, at $190 + S&H ($8 for ground) + Tax. There is currently a $50 rebate available, you can print out the form at amazon.com (it is not specific to Amazon, don't worry.)