How can I get music onto my Rio player?

The most common ways to get music onto Rio players is by ripping it from a CD or by downloading it from the Internet. Rio players come with ripping software and a music manager that help you store and organize songs on your computer.

What is an MP3?

MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. It is a compression technique that can compress audio files by a factor of 10 or more, while maintaining near-CD quality. MP3 compression can produce audio files of different quality levels measured by the amount of data per second required to reproduce that second of sound, the larger the number, the higher the audio quality, but larger the file size. We measure the number of songs you can store on your player at a compression rate of 128 kb/s (kilobytes per second).

How do I download music from the Internet?

Downloading music files from the Internet usually requires some third party software. A quick search in any search engine should uncover a variety of options. Once files have been saved to your PC, use Rio Music Manager to move them to your MP3 player.

What is Ripping?

Ripping is the term for taking songs off standard audio CDs and saving them as MP3 or WMA files on your PC. All Rio players come with software that makes it simple to rip your CDs.

How do I rip & encode songs from a CD?

Start the Rio Music Manager 2.0 software, insert the CD, choose the songs, and click the software's Copy option. The software rips the song straight from the CD and saves the sound as a WAV file on your hard drive.

WAV files consume lots of disk space. Compressing the song into MP3 saves space at the cost of a minimal decrease in sound quality.

In order to encode to MP3 you can upgrade Rio Music Manager to support MP3 encoding. Once the upgrade has been completed, you will be able to save songs directly as MP3s.

What is a playlist?

A playlist tells the computer or MP3 player what songs to play and in what order. You can put the same song or songs on different playlists.

How Do I make a playlist?

Making a playlist with Rio Music Manager 2.0 is easy:

1. Launch Rio Music Manager 2.0 on your computer.
2. Select your Rio Player from the Device List.
3. Select tracks to add to a playlist. (See below for different track selection options.)
4. Right-click a highlighted track or tracks.
5. Click Add To Playlist.
6. Click New Playlist.
7. Enter a name for your playlist.
8. Click OK.

How do I transfer tracks or playlists to my Rio player?

A. Select

1. Connect your Rio player to your computer.
2. Click My Music in the Device List. Rio Music Manager will scan your computer’s hard drive(s) for audio content that is compatible with your Rio player. Files are automatically categorized by Album by default.
3. Select tracks within a category of tracks. Categories include Albums, Artists, Genres, Songs and Playlists.
   For example, if you wish to copy all tracks from a favorite artist onto the player, click the Artists tab and then use any of the techniques in Step 4 to select the desired tracks.
4. Use any of the following techniques to select tracks:

   Track Selection Options

   You may select a single item or multiple items when making a playlist or transferring songs to your Rio:

   • Single track, album, or artist: Left-click the track, album, or artist.
   • Multiple tracks, albums, and/or artists: Press SHIFT+click or CTRL+click.
   • All tracks, albums, and artists: Press CTRL+A.
   • No tracks, albums, or artists: Press CTRL+N.
   • Every track except for the currently selected tracks:

     Click Edit,
     Click Invert Selection.

B. Transfer

Click Transfer to begin copying tracks to your Rio player.

Note: You can also load your player by dragging and dropping music files from Windows Explorer directly into the device window of Rio Music Manager.

Where do songs get stored in my Rio player?

The default location for audio content storage is your Rio’s internal memory. If optional external memory cards have been installed, their capacity will be included in the total amount displayed. When Rio Player has been selected, audio content that does not fit in the internal capacity will automatically be transferred to external capacity.

How do I control where content is stored on my Rio player?

Use the Rio Player pulldown menu to select the transfer location. Transfer locations include:

Rio Player: Includes both the internal and optional external capacity on the player (the default option).

Internal: The internal memory on the player.

External: Capacity provided by optional external memory cards (MMC or SD).