Karma Phal
The menu system on the Karma is wonderful. I mean really, really great. It's fast to learn, really intuitive, it's a joy to use. During playback the Riôstick is used for pausing or skipping tracks, the scroll wheel to fast forward or rewind. Tapping the menu button will bring up the full menu system, or holding it briefly will jump straight to the Play Music option, which allows you to browse by artist, genre, year, etc. Picking Artists will provide a view with letters down the left hand side, with the artists under that letter on the right. You scroll through to pick a letter, then pick an artist from that letter - for example, G then Grandaddy. You'll be given an offer of different albums to play, or the default "Play all tracks" option. Selecting an album will give you the individual tracks or "Play all". If only one album is found, then the player won't waste your time with a choice of one. The 1.41 firmware tested does not correctly identify "Offspring", "The Offspring" and "the offspring" as the same thing, but this is due for imminent fixing in the 1.6x firmware. (Edit: 1.68 firmware was released and subsequently installed during the editing process, all capitalisations and instances of The are fixed)You want more than just a nice menu? Okay then.
First of all, we have a full five-band parametric equaliser. In English, that means that instead of "Rock" and "Jazz" sounds, the audiophiles out there can edit the skew of five different frequency ranges by hand. The Karma is the only player I know of with this facility, though the simple Preset mode is also available if desired.
Next up, we have the format support. The Karma will play MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC. MP3 is pretty much industry standard these days, and is barely worth mentioning. WMA support means it can play tracks ripped with Windows Media Player, or tracks bought on-line from every single music store that isn't iTunes. Ogg Vorbis is generally considered as having a higher quality output than MP3 at the same bitrates, and has a firm following in the Open Source community, since unlike MP3 it is unencumbered with patents.
FLAC support deserves a mention. An easy parallel is image files - BMP files are the best quality you can get, but huge (much like WAV files for audio), whereas JPEG files are smaller but of a lower quality (MP3, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, etc). FLAC belongs halfway between the two - it is entirely lossless, containing the exact CD quality audio of the CD, but is about half the size of a WAV.
Next on the list is gapless playback. Chances are you own a CD where one track merges into the next without any kind of silence. MP3 players, including software such as Winamp, will introduce a gap where there was none. The Karma, on the other hand, does not. I tried listening to the same transition with a sample pair of tracks, using every format supported by the player; the transition between Funky Shit and Serial Thrilla on Prodigy's Fat Of The Land. Any differences between my experiences and those reported by other people are probably just down to my ripping process, but only my FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files seemed entirely gapless; on my MP3 and WMA samples, there was a faintly audible click on the line between tracks that was absent with FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. (Edit: 1.68 firmware was released and subsequently installed during the editing process, a handful of test files played back entirely gaplessly including WMA and MP3)
A quick taste-test comparison of audio formats for you:
| Test CD 1 | Test CD 2 | Test CD 3 | Approx CDs on player | |
| WAV Originals | 613 Mb | 569 Mb | 473 Mb | ~35 |
| FLAC (% decrease) | 376 Mb (39%) | 409 Mb (28%) | 303 Mb (36%) | ~55 |
| 192K CBR MP3 (% decrease) | 83.4 Mb (86%) | 77.5 Mb (86) | 64.4 Mb (86%) | ~265 |
| --alt-preset MP3 (% decrease) | 92.2 Mb (85%) | 87.9 Mb (85%) | 67.9 Mb (86%) | ~240 |
| 192K WMA 8 (% decrease) | 83.8 Mb (86%) | 78.0 Mb (86%) | 64.8 Mb (86%) | ~260 |
| 192K Ogg Vorbis (% decrease) | 81.3 Mb (87%) | 85.3 Mb (85%) | 66.8 Mb (86%) | ~255 |
To my mind, the only two formats to consider are Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. FLAC is the format of choice for audiophiles, and combined with gapless playback it really is a question of transporting around a wallet full of CDs in a 3" square package, absolutely nothing lost for the convenience. Ogg Vorbis sounds a bit better than MP3 at the same bitrate, and my experiences with gapless playback were better, so you may as well go for Ogg Vorbis if you want to save space!
One final feature is Riô DJ. Riô DJ provides some slightly more general playback settings than picking a specific year. For example, you can select all tracks from the 1970's, or for an hour of your most played or least played tracks. You can ask for all the tracks transferred onto the player within the last week, or for a simple fifteen minutes of randomly chosen music. RMM's version of DJ allows you to create some slightly more complex matches, then transfer them to the player as a playlist.
