Home > Consumer Reviews > RCA Lyra 1.5 GB MP3 Player

RCA 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.

I purchased the Lyra 1.5 GB player as a replacement for my recently defunct iPod. I wasn't expecting it to be as wonderful as iPod, but it did offer the storage capacity I wanted, and the price was right. The RCA site specified that the player was Mac compatible, an important feature for me. The player has a nice look and feel, and my Mac recognized the Lyra hard drive as soon as I connected it. I was even able to drag MP3 files from iTunes to the Lyra drive. What I was NOT able to do was organize the songs in any meaningful way. The instruction manual that comes with the product is very poor. The word "Mac" does not even appear in it. The online support did not provide any Mac assistance either. Eventually, I gave up and took the player with the included software over to a PC. The installation and setup was a bit more complicated than I thought it would be, but once it was complete, the PC running XP recognized the player. According to the manual, using MusicMatch on a PC is the way to go. Again, I could easily transfer songs, but no matter what I tried, I could not organize songs on the player. The manual says there are a couple of ways to create playlists--either before or after you transfer tunes. Again, no online support; the RCA website just parroted the manual, which really is awful. I even downloaded the newest Lyra fixes from the RCA site, but nothing worked. It's nice to know that the player will hold 375 songs, but it would be much nicer if you could organize those songs in some way. I purchased my Lyra player locally (they matched the amazon/jandr.com price), and I will be returning it shortly.

I was very excited for this product and purchased it the very day it was released. At first glance, the size of the player and the clarity of the screen was impressive...and the menu is quite loaded with features (comparable to the iPOD). To my dismay however, the product crashed constantly and I had to use a paper clip to reset the system at least 20x within the first few days of using the product. When the Lyra *did* work, my music skipped or would erratically play my mp3s really fast (as if chipmunks were singing). Also, there was a lag time of at least 5 seconds between tracks which really got irritating after a while as I like my music to flow smoothly. Dead air just ruins the mood. I reckon the tiny 1.5 harddrive is working too hard. Oh, and the controls are not very ergonomic. You have to fiddle with the buttons a bit in order to get in the swing of things. Lastly, RCA lacks a technical support forum or knowledgebase about these issues. Needless to say, I do not recommend this player. I returned it after 10 days.

At first, I was thrilled to find an mp3 player for the RCA Lyra's price and capacity, and it worked great when I began using it. However, only a few weeks afterwards, almost all of the songs began to skip, and about a month after that, I had difficulty just trying to turn it on! Now, just FIVE MONTHS after buying it, the harddrive has completely crashed! Now I can't use this player at all, and I've lost $150! Apparently, I am NOT the only one who has suffered these problems, as most everyone who has held onto this player for an extended period of time has been confronted with harddrive problems.

My advice: STAY CLEAR! While it's a good bargain, you'll end up wasting your time and (if you didn't fill out the warranty info, like me.) your money.

I'll admit that the storage capacity is nice and the price fits my budget, but the product is inferior in every meaning of the word.

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).