RIO 500 linux drivers

Cesar Miquel

Keith Clayton

Bruce Tenison

This set of utilities lets you upload songs and manage folders for Diamonds Rio 500 player under Linux and *BSD. The utilities have worked for Linux under i386, PPC and Alpha architectures. Using a driver for *BSD it works for FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD (take a look at the links section for more info).

News

4/30/2002 WARNING! Brett Saunders has reported a serious bug when using 128MB Smartmedia cards. Until we investigate this issue further we recommend that you don't use these programs (or any derivative work) with those cards. I've personally used these tools with 64MB cards with no problem and I've never had reports of Smartmedia cards smaller that 64MB having problems.

8/2/2001 After a long time of not having time I finally released gnome-rio, the GUI program which I wrote a long time ago and which Till Harbaum greatly improve. You can visit its homepage here.

6/2/2001 OK. I've been sent a lot of email asking for Rio 600 support. Jasper Wallace along with Nathan Hjelm and Mike Touloumtzis (and maybe others...) have finally been able to transfer songs to the rio! The code is still experimental at this point so don't blame them for anything if it blows your Rio600 into a million pieces... Anyway, you can find it here

11/16/2000 Hadess had an email interview with us and it got published on Linux.com Click here to read it. He is also writting a front end to access the rio called Walk500. Check it out!

8/5/2000 There's a new util written by Iwasa Kazmi (kzmi@ca2.so-net.ne.jp) which allows you to add an animated splash to your Rio that is displayed when the unit is powered on. Its really easy to use and works great! It is written for Linux and *BSD. Try it! You can grab it here.

7/25/2000 Some news on the windows front: Tom Kistner (tom@duncanthrax.net) has released the first windows application based on Andy Sherwoods COM object (which, BTW, he has more or less finished). You can grab it here.

6/15/2000 Its here! Version 0.7 has been released and the good news is that we have smartmedia support! Tim Rice has successfully tried 8Mb, 32Mb and even 64Mb cards (with new firmware upgrade from Diamond). Other corrections are:

- Utils should now work on 64bit architecures (like Alpha).
- rio_stat now displays the firmware version.
- 8 folder limit removed.
- Smartmedia and font support added to librio500_api.
- Problems with rio_add_song and files with bitrates != 128kbps

You can grab the source here. Or look here. for RPMS, SRPMS, etc. Read the official announcement here To get more information about the Rio 500 support visit our project page.

5/30/2000 Smartmedia support comming real soon now. Many people have asked for this. The good news is that Tim Rice has been able to add smartmedia support (and correct a lot of things) for our software and even 64Mb cards seem to work (albeit some minor glitches). Anyway, this code is in the CVS and once we have more or less tested it we will make a new release. Thanks Tim!

5/6/2000 For those Window users who are unhappy with Diamond's software, Andy Sherwood is working on a COM object for accessing the Rio via C/C++/Visual Basic/Java etc, and a simple program for managing MP3 files on the Rio. He has setup a webpage so go there to get the latest info. The URL is: http://www.evilaliens.com/Rio500Remix.htm

4/22/2000 New release (v0.6) is out. After a long time we have finally released a new version of the rio utils. These are the most important changes:

- FreeBSD and OpenBSD supported now.
- Id3v1 Tags supported.
- New long gnu-style options.
- Support for usbdevfs (no kernel module needed).
- The kernel module is now distributed as a separate file.
- rio_get_song added so that you can transfer files from your rio!
- We now have i386-rpms, ppc-rpms and src-rpms available.

You can grab the source here. Or look here. for RPMS, SRPMS, etc. Read the official announcement here To get more information about the Rio 500 support visit our project page.

2/9/2000 important! there seems to be an error in the readme file of the latest release (v0.5). it seems the major/minor are mixed! the rio device will temporarily be using major=10 and minor=180. so, for the moment only do:

   mknod /dev/rio c 10 180
   chmod a+rw /dev/rio

As soon as are assigned a real major/minor pair we'll release a new version. Sorry for the inconvinience.

2/5/2000 Well we made it! We finally released the code to the general public! The version is v0.5 and you can grab the source here. Read the official announcement here We also added a list for users to send us their comments and requests. To add yourselves to the list and, in general, to get more information about the Rio 500 support visit our project page.

1/31/2000 Ok, we are really close to releasing the software. The code and web page have been moved to sourceforge. If you've never been there you don't know what you are missing. Congrats to the people of VA Linux! They rule. Anyway, at the moment you can create and delete folders in your rio, transfer songs, even change the fonts used to display on the rio. Two other people have joined the development team (which was basically myself): Bruce Tenison and Keith Clayton. Bruce is in charge of the font code (but does other stuff too) and Keith is providing PPC support (so everyone can use their Rio :)). Some other people are working on a windows version but theres nothing out yet. You can get a tarball of the latest cvs stuff from http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cvstarballs/rio500-cvsroot.tar.gz.

Requirements

A Rio 500 (duh!)

A motherboard with USB that is supported by the Linux kernel

A kernel with USB support (i suggest using 2.3.34 or better)

glib installed on your machine. You can get it from: www.gtk.org

Download

Latest version (0.7):

Source: http://download.sourceforge.net/rio500/rio500-0.7.tar.gz
Binary rpms: http://download.sourceforge.net/rio500/
Latest cvs snapshot: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cvstarballs/rio500-cvsroot.tar.gz

To compile the software read the README and the INSTALL files supplied for instructions. If you are using *BSD make sure you read INSTALL.bsd.

Links

Here are a few links to other projects which relate to the Rio 500 utils:

*BSD USB stack In here you will find the device driver for *BSD users. http://www.etla.net/~n_hibma/

Walk500 A Gnome tool for managing your Rio500. http://hadess.net/walk500.shtml

rio500_tui A TUI front end to manage your Rio500. http://rio500-tui.sourceforge.net

gnome-rio Yet another gnome tool to communicate with the rio. http://rio500.sourceforge.net/gnome-rio

grio500 This is a Gtk frontend to the rio utilities. http://grio500.whacked.net

Rio500 remix A device driver and COM object for windows for communicating with the rio. http://www.evilaliens.com/Rio500Remix.htm

Griostat Displays status information from the Rio500. http://www.engr.ucdavis.edu/~swkidder/software/griostat

JRio500 A frontend to the utilities written in Java 2. http://ronin.sphere-web.com/JRio500/

RioFXP A windows application to interchange files with your Rio based on Andy Sherwoods COM object. http://duncanthrax.net/riofxp/

Rioanim A Linux and *BSD utility to load an animated splash to the rio. Written by Iwasa Kazmi http://www02.u-page.so-net.ne.jp/ca2/kzmi/rio-tools/rioanim.html.

References

To understand a bit more on how the USB works and the software used in the windows version of the RIO check the following sites:

I wrote a little web page describing my findings of how the protocol works. It is outdated and incomplete. I suggest looking at the source for this project but it might help a bit. Here is the URL:

http://rio500.sourceforge.net/rio_protocol.html

Here you will find the .pdf files with the usb specs:

http://www.usb.org

The windows driver supplied by Diamond (riousb.sys) is basically an exact copy of the program which appears in this page:

http://www.microsoft.com/HWDEV/driver/usbmini.htm

César Miquel (miquel@df.uba.ar)