RIP, Rio: A Digital Music Pioneer Dies

This just in: D&M Holdings, the company behind the Rio line of digital music players, has announced that it's going to stop making products under the Rio name. D&M sold some Rio-related technology assets to Sigmatel in July, but it looks like the Rio name (and current Rio models) will be going away. And I'm feeling kind of nostalgic.

Back in 1998, Diamond Multimedia (remember them?) introduced the Rio PMP300--which was not merely the first Rio, but the first significant portable MP3 player. It was also the subject of the first big legal skirmish over digital music: The Recording Industry Association of America sued Diamond over the Rio's ability to play non-copy protected music...a suit which Diamond thankfully won, establishing legitimacy for every MP3 player to come.

But the reason I'm feeling nostalgic is because the PMP300 was also my first MP3 player: I bought a Compaq computer that came with one. Even at the time, I could tell that the PMP300, while innovative, was at best a first rough draft. Its 32MB of memory held less than one CD's worth of music. Downloading music from a PC via the parallel port took forever. And the little spring that held the AA battery in place was a little too springy--which meant that if I joggled the player, it was likely to lose all my tunes.

None of this mattered all that much--I still loved the little thing and took it everywhere for quite awhile. (I eventually replaced it with Creative's equally innovative original Nomad Jukebox, the first major hard-drive player.) That's a photo of the PMP300 to the left; it's worth noting that it got enough things right that an iPod circa 2005 looks remarkably similar, with many of the controls and features located in the same place. (The PMP300 cost $199; today, that gets you an iPod Mini with 125 times the capacity.)

After the PMP300 came scads of other Rio models over the years--and judging from PC World's reviews, the brand had a solid track record. (In July, we picked the Rio Carbon as one of the 100 best products of 2005.) But it also had a hard-luck history. Diamond ran into financial trouble and morphed into SonicBlue, which went bankrupt. Then D&M took over the Rio brand...until now.

So goodbye, Rio. We may live in an iPod world--for now--but history will remember you as the player that launched the digital music revolution. Or at least it should...