A Music Player Only the RIAA Can't Love

The recording industry clearly dislikes the Pioneer Inno, the new portable XM radio receiver that records live music, acts as an MP3 player and offers downloads from online music services.

Last week, the Recording Industry Association of America filed suit against XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., alleging that the device's technology amounts to a music service that should pay licensing fees for the music it allows users to record.

It's unfortunate that the RIAA has taken aim at this new radio receiver because, aside from a few small glitches, the Inno experience is a winner.

At $400, the Inno combines a compact, stylish MP3 player that offers a mostly good experience of everything that it offers. The satellite radio signal works reliably outdoors, seldom dropping the XM radio signal unless the small antenna is covered -- by a hand or a thick coat pocket, for example. Indoors (and underground in the Metro tunnels), the signal fades but returns when the Inno is placed in its docking cradle with its home antenna.

What was most impressive, though, was the recording capability. The Inno can record XM radio on a song-by-song basis complete with information about the song title and artist, though sometimes it missed the precise start or end of the songs. It can also record long blocks of music.

Even when not recording, it holds the last 10 minutes of audio in memory, so you can still record a song from the beginning even if you push the record button when the song is nearly over.

Users can transfer their own MP3 and WMA music files to the Inno for playback on the go, and they can connect to the Napster music service to purchase digital music in the WMA format.

XM songs, however, cannot be copied from the player to the PC, though they can be purchased from Napster and then played on both the Inno and Windows computers. The integration feels seamless, much like the vaunted iPod/iTunes pairing. The only real drawback is that some XM shows do not provide track information, so the songs can't be seamlessly purchased.

The Inno is small and light with a pleasingly hand-friendly shape marred only by a faceplate with an oddly sharp edge. The bright, colorful screen has several display modes and can show sports scores and a stock ticker.

The interface is clean and reasonably intuitive. The Inno conveniently resumes playback at the same part in a song that was playing when it was turned off, but the fast forward/rewind is very slow, with no quick way to hop to a later part of a long recording. You can create favorite station lists, playlists, but you can't pause in live play mode. Scheduled recording options are limited.

On the downside, the Inno's battery life is relatively short, clocking in at under nine hours for recorded content, and under five hours for live XM radio. Fortunately, the battery ($30) is user-replaceable, unlike the iPod's.

The biggest drawback is that the player's storage capacity is only one gigabyte, which holds about 50 hours of XM recordings. It can also be partitioned to share space for XM recordings (about 25 hours) and MP3s and WMAs (about eight to 10 hours).

Despite all the extras, the best part of this player is on-the-go access to XM radio, with its 24-hour local traffic and weather and its vast library of music -- much of which you'll never hear on playlist-limited broadcast radio.