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Diamond Rio PMP 300 Manufactured by Diamond Multimedia Retail Price $199 By Vajra Chandrasekera and Kanishka Wanasundera January 06, 1998  Introduction

Diamond Multimedia is already an undisputed giant in multimedia, hugely successful in everything from soundcards to modems and graphics accelerators. Now, they’re breaking new ground with their Rio PMP300 player, which is portable, palm-sized, and plays MP3s instead of tapes or CDs. 

For the uninitiated, MP3 is the hottest craze today in digital audio compression, which is freely available on the net. MP3 is capable of compressing a 30MB song that clutters up your hard disk to a mere 3MB, without losing much of its original sound quality. MP3, which stands for MPEG 1 layer 3, is able to do this by trimming the sounds that are above and below the range of human hearing and by trimming parts of background music which are shadowed by vocals and louder instruments. The great advantage of MP3 compression is that sound quality loss can be kept to a minimum depending on the sample rate  you encode the song. Songs that are being encoded at 128kbps will produce sound of near-CD quality. A small description is given about the MP3 format in the manual that comes with this package, so if you’re totally lost you might want to refer to it.

Now that the MP3 format is a growing craze on the net, many software manufacturers are coming up with various new MP3 players for your desktop, with WinAmp and Win Play being two of the first MP3 players to come out. But none of these manufacturers thought of taking this technology any further than your desktop, until Diamond Multimedia came up with the portable MP3 player called the Rio PMP300. Though very much similar to a normal walkman or portable CD player, the Rio does not play music through an audio cassette or CD, rather it plays recorded music through the built-in 32MB flash memory, which is capable of storing 30 minutes of CD-quality digital music. Also, since there are no moving parts, skipping is a thing of the past, we can say without hesitation that this 2.4-ounce lightweight portable MP3 player is truly going to revolutionize portable audio player technology.