The market has been waiting to hear what SonicBlue was going to come out with after their assets were purchased by D&M back in April 2003. Two Rio portable music players were shown on CNet , the Nitrus and the Karma.

The Nitrus looks about the size of a box of matches and is the first player to use a 1.5-gigabyte, 1-inch hard drive. Holding around 350 songs, it will play for sixteen hours, has great quality sound with 96Db and will cost $199.

The Karma is a more serious beast with either 20Gb or 40Gb storage and a reported 18 hours battery life and costing from $399. The docking station has audio out for HiFi connection, USB2 and, interestingly, an Ethernet port. The device can be assigned an IP address and be used to reference content held on other devices on the network - an inter feature, and the first to appear on a portable music player.

Music can be stored in four formats, MP3, WMA, and two open source formats, Ogg Vorbis (Digital music format) and the lesser known Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC).

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