My Life with the Rio Karma

sadness: My Rio Karma died after just over a year and a half of faithful service. The hard drive makes sounds no hard drive should ever make. I'll keep this page up for reference. Since I don't have a karma any more, I really can't imagine how helpful I can be if you email me.

I picked up a Rio Karma not too long ago, and while I like the form factor and the Ogg Vorbis support, I ran into some snags getting it to work well under Linux. For the record, this is Debian (Unstable) on ppc, using j2sdk1.3.1.

Firmware: You need a windows machine to upgrade the firmware. Apparently firmware updates have slowed a bit, but the developers seem quick to fix issues. My Karma came with firmware 1.41 installed, but I flashed to 1.68. New firmware updates are posted on the Rio Karma 'downloads & manuals' site.

Software: If you don't run windows, you need RMML (Rio Music Manager Light) to talk to the Karma, a java application. There is no usb mass storage support, nor can you SMB or NFS mount the device. The Karma has ethernet, and if you point a web browser at it, you'll get a link for the "official" version of rmmlite.jar. The RMML author updates the program occasionally: get the very latest RMML from rmml.dev.java.net.

Here's the list of RMML versions i've tried and some notes:

20031204: version that came with the Karma. Worked ok, except for the initial massive transfer of files from my computer to the device. It would crap out with an "out of memory" exception.
20040601 and 20040528: one window pops up for every file transfered. Annoying as hell. This 'feature' might have gone away when I updated the firmware to v. 1.68.
20040330: Still evaluating. I was finally able to upload a ton of songs, but it took an hour or so

I had a few .m3u files (playlists) that listed my entire collection. Those playlists seemed to confuse the uploading process somehow. When i removed them, the 'out of memory' exceptions went away.

Hardware: The Karma has an ARM processor running eCos. Someone wrote up more hardware information at lonelymachines.org/karma4.html. In fact, that guy basically goes into a ton more detail than I do, so you should probably just read all 4 pages of his writeup.

Interconnects: The Karma comes with a dock w/ Ethernet, RCA, power, and USB. The USB is not useful unless you're running windows, so you'll have to do all your file transferes over Ethernet. The Karma will get a dhcp address when you plug it into your network if you've got a dhcp server running. Otherwise, you can assign an IP adddress manually. The ethernet transfer rates are pretty bad. I've never seen higher than 2.0 MBytes/sec. Apparently the karma is CPU bound on ethernet transfers (source: this forum post).

Resources

A Rio engineer offers an explanation why the Karma and other Rio devices are not USB Mass Storage devices:
karmalib is a java implementation of the Rio network API
PearlLib is another java implementation of the Rio network API
libkarma is a C library implementing the Rio network API. Comes with a few command line tools. The new version byteswaps, but I haven't had a chance to try it out.
Some guy is reverse-engineering the USB protocol and has preliminary linux support. A long, long way off from true "USB Mass Storage" support, but fun nontheless. Linux driver for Rio Karma.

Last updated:

Mon Mar 13 17:54:07 CST 2006
Rob Latham ( rob at terizla dot org )