Rating: 
Summary: Very good for the money
Review: Lots of features. Works as advertised. Excellent menu lets you find your song in the 1.5 GB of storage by Artist, Album, Song title, Genre, and even Year. A visit to the RCA website added more features with a software update, including a program that creates playlists for your Lyra by grouping songs together based on acoustic analysis. This feature works great, creating seven playlists for the 150 songs I have loaded so far (with room for another 200 or so songs.) Overall great unit.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect companion for my iPOD!
Review: Love my iPOD. Wouldn't trade it for the world. The iPOD is my "RV", the RCA Lyra is my "Bike". This thing is so tiny, it's amazing. I use it every morning with my run, my iPOD is a wee bit big for my run. I take the RCA, tuck it in the waistband of my jogging shorts and run till i can't run anymore, and still have plenty of songs to get me back home. Completely easy to use, on a Mac that is. Tried it on my pc, the software was confusing and strange. But on my mac, i plugged in the unit with the supplied usb cord, the RCA icon appeared on my desktop, opened iTunes, and just drug the songs i wanted onto the white RCA icon on my desktop. That easy.
i was worried about the "ok for mac" on the description, but like just about everything else, it was far easier on a Mac.
Buy it, enjoy it. It's great if you don't need a lot of music at one time.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad Bad Quality!!!
Review: Myself and two of my closest friends brought this player from [retail store]. I noticed that that it sometimes skipped, and would sometime turn off on its own, I compared notes with my friends and skipping was common to all 3 of us, personally I feel that it is due to inferior quality components. Well RCA never was known for great quality and but I felt like giving them a shot but never again.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing and unreliable
Review: Purchased this MP3 player because it utilizes MusicMatch (which I use) and has a 1.5 g hard drive.- instructions provided are vague and terrible
- impossible to get tech support
- sounds awesome (when it works)
- great carrying case
- built in battery is nice
- easy to transfer music (once you figure it out)
- no FM tuner
- I've returned 2 within the past month (hard drive crashed and couldn't be reset) The first failure I attributed to a fluke but the same thing happened to the second one. Couldn't be reset. Received a full refund. Can anyone recommend an MP3 that has a decent sized hard drive, reliable, MusicMatch software and a proper carrying case for working out?
Rating:
Summary: Good first attempt, but with major flaws
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: High hopes fall FLAT!
Review: Received this as a gift.
DOESN'T WORK AT ALL WITH MY MAC OS X 10.3
It knows it's there but is unwritable and won't mount. If I unplug it and turn it on, it turns off after a few seconds and it's fully charged.
Do yourself a favor, buy an iPod!
Rating:
Summary: Died after 4 months!!!
Review: Steer clear of this one. I bought mine new off of eBay (I think I got for around $125 including shipping and insurance) and it died about four months later. Unfortuantely, I blew off submitting the warranty paperwork so I don't have recourse with RCA. Plus, I can't find a place to service it locally-- even though RCA's lame website said there was an electronics repair place that could service it. That shop said they don't work on mp3 player. Even if they were capable, it'd probably be more cost effective just to buy an new one.
I think i'm going to go for the more expensive but more reliable ?? Ipod or similarly highly ranked hard-disk based player.
Rating:
Summary: Great Product
Review: This is a great product with a fantastic amount of storage for such a small device. To get this amount of storage with a flash based system would cost a fortune. The big hard drive based MP3 players are BIG. This is the right storage at the right physical size. Store a whole CD collection in something about the size of a pager. Cool!!
Rating:
Summary: Amazing storage in small package
Review: This is an amazing amount of storage in a tiny package. You can store an entire music collection on this little MP3 player. Amazing
Rating:
Summary: I love it - but it has to go
Review: This is the 2nd RCA lyra jukebox that I will be returning to the store today - within a two week span. The first one I had - the hard drive crashed within 3 days and could not be reset (only had 20 - 30 songs on it). I went to the store and exchanged it for the same player thinking that it had been damaged during shipping, but here it is less than a week later and this one has done the same thing. So I think I will try a different brand this time around. I wish it wouldn't keep crashing because I really liked the sound of it, but a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.
| 
