| SPECS |
Rio PMP300
32MB built-in memory
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I FEEL FOR
the salesperson at Circuit City who's given the job of
pushing the Diamond Rio onto an unsuspecting public. There was already
no moving those Sony MiniDiscs out the door; in the time that it takes
to just explain what the Rio is to the average consumer, there could be
commissions on a couple shelf systems and a 200 CD changer.
The Rio PMP300 is a portable music player about the size of a deck of
playing cards. It runs on a single AA battery for hours; since it has no
moving parts, it won't skip no matter how much it's jostled. (Here's
where our salesperson shakes the Rio vigorously. No moving parts!) Out
of the box, it holds about half an hour of near-CD quality music. It
retails for under $200.
But wait - there's more! The music it plays is in a format called MP3. For
those who haven't already come to understand how a mere file format can
radically transform the musical landscape, here's a glimpse beyond the
horizon into our friction-free future: Listening to your personalized audio
stream via Internet radio, you hear a song by an unknown, unsigned artist
that speaks to you like no other can. It's got "cultural milestone" written
all over it - this is a verse, chorus, verse that you're going to fall in
love to and that'll get you through the morning commute. You click
here to download, authorizing a micropayment of less than a dollar.
Safely stored on your hard drive, you're then able to listen to the
single whenever the mood hits you - or you can load the song into your
portable MP3 player, as part of the perfect soundtrack for your
on-the-move lifestyle.
That's the pitch for the mainstream consumer, but for the geek chic market,
there's this added-value: evil corporate lawyers representing big media
conglomerates are out to destroy the Rio, because they say you won't pay
for music if you can pirate it for free. They won't tell you this at
Circuit City, of course (after all, they were the ones who came up
with Divx), but the fact is anyone can copy an MP3 file, and every copy
sounds as good as the first. Yo-ho-ho! As the Recording Industry
Association of America, or the RIAA, the lawyers have gone to the courts
to try to stop the sale of the Rio. Unsure of their ability to openly
smash the format, they also seek to co-opt the entire MP3 movement, with
a plan to steal the music back from the people called the Secure Digital
Music Initiative, or SDMI. But MP3, the story goes, is too compelling a
format to be held in check by the Man.
SOLD?
Sucker. If anyone really thinks MP3 is the future of music, they
only need look at the most popular download at MP3.com: the '70s paean to
nothing lasting forever except the enervated anthems of AOR radio, Kansas's
"Dust In The Wind." As it stands now, MP3 is a format for B-sides and
studio outtakes.
Here's the real-life version of the above scenario: having little
interest in a "holiday-themed" Billy Idol track that his own label hopes
to save a not-so-adoring public from, and even less interest in a 99
cent single from last year's teenager, Frank Black, I pop a CD into my
computer and encode a track as an MP3 file. I marvel at the near-CD
quality sound. I plug
Diamond's portable MP3 player, the Rio, into my PC's parallel port, launch
the Rio software, and load my music file into the device. I then place the
Rio neatly to the side of my keyboard, since I spend most of my day sitting
in front of a computer monitor. I put another CD in my drive and press play.
At best, MP3 is destined to become just another music format, alongside CDs
and vinyl. Because sound quality is lost during the compression process,
it's unlikely MP3 will displace CDs; if you can order your music online and
get it delivered in a couple days complete with liner notes, why would you
settle for lower-quality MP3? The music needs to be stored somewhere; I'd
just as soon someone burned the CD for me. And if a half-decade of online
publishing has proven anything, it's that marketing is more important
than distribution - downloadable music will give a lot of independent
artists a chance to build their audience, but by and large the hits will
continue to
be owned by the major labels.
Still, people will find good uses for the Rio and MP3 - and given the
format's popularity, they already have. One of the real differentiators
between MP3 and other formats has nothing to do with the quality of its
sound reproduction or the fact that it enables music to be downloaded over
the Internet: instead, it's the concept of the playlist. Where once most
people would have listened to albums, MP3 players, including the Rio,
incorporate playlist editors which allow users to be the DJ -- to structure
and organize the listening experience. It's different from building a
collection of singles; the playlist focuses your attention on how a given
song relates to another. While this is nothing new to anyone who's ever
given or received a mix tape, it makes music a more active experience,
where the assemblage of tracks becomes an open challenge to actively craft
a greater meaning from so many disparate elements. Think of it as a kind of
information design, where the data is mostly audio.
It's this aspect of interface over and above the real or perceived
strengths of the MP3 specification that makes the space worth watching.
While MP3 may fall short of delivering the future of music, it may well add
a significant contribution to the future of interface design. Which is why
the Rio, as an MP3 player, is so disappointing. Despite being attractive --
it lacks sharp corners; the stop, play, forward track, and reverse track
functions at the center of the unit are arranged in an i, j, k, m diamond
-- the Rio is far from realizing the true promise of MP3.
For starters, did it have to be black? In audio components, it seems, black
means high tech, silver means solid state, yellow means waterproof,
woodgrain means you picked it up at Goodwill, and anything else means it's
My First Sony.
More importantly, the Rio is an MP3 player without skins. Winamp, the
format's most popular player, introduced the concept of skins, a plug-in
architecture for customizing the software's interface along the lines of
desktop themes in the Mac OS and Windows. From the Winamp site, you can
choose from over 900 user-contributed interfaces, from the futuristic to an
antiqued woodgrain look. Other players have taken the concept even further,
allowing the skin designer complete control over the end user interface,
from the appearance and positioning of buttons to whether or not a volume
control can be turned all the way up to 11.
This isn't just about appearances: Sonique, an MP3 player developed in
Montana, sports radically stylized curves; an MP3 player called Soritong
looks like a space station. But the desire to stand out in a crowd also
spawned many innovative improvements to the user experience: in Sonique,
users can switch between radically different interface layouts, depending
upon the amount of screen real estate available; in Soritong, a single
slider can be toggled to adjust volume, balance, and to go directly to any
portion of the song.
Of course, audio applications never had a great deal of need for interface
conventions developed primarily for document manipulation. While a
page-based metaphor has acted as a point of departure for computer
interface designers, too many designers of audio software have relied on a
literal translation of real-world sound equipment to the computer screen.
CD player apps are made to look just like real CD players, down to LCD
displays rendered on a high resolution monitor. Until the advent of MP3,
the advance of consumer audio interfaces had almost come to a standstill.
What could the Rio have learned from this? Although the Rio is a
specialized device, devoted, as it is, to audio playback of MP3 files, does
it make real sense as a $200 product, when it shares so many components --
processor, memory, display -- with a PDA? Perhaps what we really need is a
palm-size computer with a touch screen for a display, giving designers the
leeway to create specialized application interfaces while helping the rest
of us deal with an armload of handheld devices. After all, the MP3 format
has helped reinvigorate software interface design just as it had gotten
safe and boring. If only the same could convincingly be said for the music.
Carl Steadman is the co-founder of Suck, and a columnist for The Industry Standard.
This is his third monthly column for FEED.
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SPECIAL ISSUE
The Future of Drugs A FEED Special Issue RE:
REPORT
ESSAY
SOUND & FURY THE MATERIALIST
DAILIES
12.04.00
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