mp3-cd players
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RCA Lyra 1 5 GB MP3 Player
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Rating: 3.18/5 from 17 reviews DisappointingGood first attempt, but with major flawsRCA must be given credit for inventing a new category of MP3 players: the mini jukebox with a 1.5GB hard disk. (Now other companies are also coming out with similar products, including Rio.) The 1.5gb Lyra looks nice and has a lot of features. Unfortunately, the designers are probably total nerds in every sense of the word, because, ugh, they lack common sense when it comes to designing a consumer product. The 1.5gb (=1.4GB) player supports both MP3 and WMA, so if you encode songs at 64bps in WMA, you can fit about 50 hours of music, at 2 minutes per MB. The controls are pretty straightforward, with the stop button doubling up as power. The screen is backlit and large, with block characters that are easy to read. It also displays all the MP3 tags, so you know exactly what you are playing. An included program called ID3man can label MP3 files without tags; however its success rate was rather disappointing with my files ripped years ago when I had no idea about the tags. Anyway, sound quality is good, if not at the Nomad level. What's really annoying is the 3-4 second pause between songs. And the fact that sometimes when you skip ahead, the Lyra seems to have hung. It's not really a crash; if you wait 5 seconds or more, it will come back to life, so take with a grain of salt some other reviewers' claim of "constant crashes." They really don't know what they are talking about. Also, you should *always* profile the Lyra's hard drive after downloading files. The profiling process identifies the music files and builds a database for them. If you don't profile, the Lyra can really crash. As long as you profile diligently, you'll be fine. Yes, this also works as an external drive. And the USB 2.0 connection supports High-Speed, so you get fast transfers. Don't waste your $I bought this player ($160 at my local Costco) for my husband for Father's Day. We spent many hours trying to get the software to work, and I never did get songs transfered to the player. Also I couldn't find a way to delete files from the player (it comes preloaded with some music--most of which was not our taste). The users manual is terrible, there are no support phone numbers, and the RCA website just refers you to the manual. I will be returning this player and buying another brand. | ||||||||||||||||
1. The audio driver (ie: sound quality) is cheap. Infact the volume doesn't even go very loud. And at the very top range of the volume, music becomes slightly distorted. In addition, the bass and depth of the sound is poor. For a technology that should excell past the quality of CD players, my old Sony CD walkman does a better job than the RCA. Much better.
2. I own a Mac and this thing is NOT mac compatable, dispite the "mac compatable" label and the mac logo on the side of the box. You can drag and drop songs onto the player with a mac, but you cannot update the firmware, you cannot organize the songs, and mac's "sync" program does not reconize it as a device; even though this program is compatable with cell phones, mp3 players, iPods, PDA's, etc. Not only that, but there is NO mac support online....NONE.
All I can say is that I am disappointed with my purchase and I wish i had an iPod right now (even though they are more expensive, at this point I think it would have been worth it).