Why Diamond makes awesome hardware but their programmers should die horrible deaths.

I won't claim to have been around since the birth of MP3s, but I've been around for awhile. Since before WinAmp 2.0 anyway. I also won't claim to have been in the portable MP3 player market forever. Sure I drooled over the Eiger Labs MPMan, but didn't buy one. I also didn't get fanatical and make my own like I know some people did.

Instead, I bided my time, waited for a major commercial product, and bought the Diamond Rio PMP300. It was awesome. I know people complained about it loading slow (parallel port connection) and not holding much (9-10 songs), but I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It worked great for me because I didn't really have many CDs, but did have a pretty good sized collection of MP3s. Not that I did anything illegal of course, I uh...bought lots of CDs and ripped them and then put them in...storage...yeah that's it *wink wink* Anyway, I loved it. The software was decent, but just barely. I replaced it fast enough anyway with RioShell, this awesome little freeware program that replaced the Diamond program. It was incredibly simple. Just load songs onto it or take them off (it enabled that function too, which was taken out of the Diamond software for legal reasons, remember?). So I went along happily with my PMP300 for awhile and then I heard about (drum roll) the Rio500. Even better. It had everything that the 300 had lacked, and tons of cool features. So of course I bought one.

It was very cool. Smaller than the 300, twice as much memory, backlit screen, hell, everybody and their mother makes an MP3 player these days, and I've still got my 500.

The problem was the software. It sucked ass. My idea of an ideal loading program would be a 500k little clunker like RioShell (which was never updated to support anything after the 300 as far as I know) with like three buttons on it: Upload, Erase, and Format. That's all it needs. I want to be able to just grab a song off my hard drive and stick it on the damn thing. The software that came with my Rio500 had to index EVERY MP3 ON MY HARD DRIVE and then I had to select them from a list that it made, and it more often than not didn't interpret the ID3 tag correctly so I'd have to search for the damn song by how long it was or something, and if I ever moved, renamed, or added new songs, I had to tell it that I'd done that. It was also horrendous bloatware. It came with a CD ripper, burning software, and some kind of portal-interface thing. I never use any of it. First of all because it sucks, I'll use my own programs thank you very much, and second because you have to PAY for the extra features. Excuse me, I just spent how much on an MP3 player? And now you want me to BUY the right to use your crappy ripping program? They should be paying me.

Meanwhile, I love the hardware. Rarely if ever had a problem with it that can't be blamed on constant use and abuse.

I like the idea of the RioVolt though, it just plays MP3 CDs, hard for their programmers to screw that up :)