Rio Cali 256 Review

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Rio Cali 256
4.3 stars
Average rating for this product is: 4.3 out of 5

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Certo Glenn's Review of Rio Cali 256 MP3 Player

5th Apr 2005

Overall Rating

3.5 stars
  • Value for money
    3.5 stars
  • Sound Quality
    5 stars
  • Features
    3.5 stars
  • Time MP3 Player Owned
    Less than a Week
  • Battery Life
    5 stars
  • Memory
    1 gig over onboard memory
Good Points

Audio quality is straight forward delivery of Mp3/WMA data, therefore very fine. One of its great features is the on-screen graphic equalizer. Battery life is surprisingly good, at least as far as I know to judge.


Bad Points

File management is...well, it virtually isn't.


General Comments

I purchased 2 1-gig "external" memory cards for the Rio Cali 256. Drag and Drop from Explorer works well, but apparently, the RIO does not retain the folder segregations. That is if you have 100 files in 10 folders and you want to play file 3 in folder 10, there is no means to access any folders. You have to punch the forward button 93 times to get to that file. :-( Then I saw in the manual that the RIO uses M3U playlists. "Great, I'll get around the folder problem by making playlists with MusicMatch. Then I found out that the playlists only work with the "internal" memory and not with the optional flash card. So I/you can have a gigabyte of storage, i.e., hundreds of songs and no way to sort or categorize them. They are all in an open area and the playlist feature will not even access the data on the flash card. :-(

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Members' Comments onCerto Glenn's Review

  • richmar on 12th Feb 2006

    Actually, you can organise your music with the Rio Player. I found this out by accident as it's not in the manual. All you do is put a winamp playlist file in every folder that you create and the player will recongize the playlist files. When you go to select the music you want to play just select by playlist. That's it... works every time.