Diamond Rio 500

Diamond was one of the first manufacturers to release an MP3 player and one of the first to deliver a 64Mb model. The Rio 500 benefits from looking less like a toy and more like a serious accessory, but it's not only the looks that have improved. Apart from the obvious advantage of having more memory to play with, we were impressed with the device's user-friendly nature.

The bundled Rioport Audio Manager software is the best in the test and lets you drag and drop music files from one location to another. Upon installation, it will scan your hard disk and neatly round up all the MP3 files on it. Transfer of the tracks from your hard disk to the player is also noticeably quicker, chiefly because the device uses a swift USB connection. It made short work of downloading the tracks, managing to completely transfer 64Mb of music data in about one-and-a-half minutes using the parallel port. The other MP3 players we tested took between two to four minutes to transfer only 32Mb.