My $300 Rio Karma MP3 player is now broken. I didn’t drop it. It wasn’t accidentally dropped into a lake. No, I did something much worse: I used a documented, built-in function of the player’s firmware. On the Karma, there is an option to “Rescan Music”. Apparently, this looks through all the songs loaded onto the player and rebuilds its database. I figured, hey, why not use it? What could go wrong? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Before rescanning, 4000 songs were loaded onto the player. Now, it reports only 2000 songs, yet the hard drive is still just as full as before. Not good.
I was just a bit angry about this. Why did my player corrupt its music database when I used a function designed to fix it? Some research gave me the answer: Rio’s firmware team is a bunch of idiots. The first report of this problem I can find is from early January. It’s late March, and the problem remains. WHY?! This is a really fucking serious bug, damnit! A Rio representative says a new firmware release, one which will fix this problem, will be available… well, uh, they don’t really know, but hey, it’ll be soon, and then everything’ll be just fine!
Give me a fucking break. I absolutely love the design and features of the Karma, but there’s no way I’ll ever buy a Rio player again.
