Product Description

RCA RD2850 -- Put your entire music collection on this ultra-portable Lyra series player, and enjoy it virtually anywhere. Supports ID3 tag display HDD SmartTrax Navigation Built-in Lithium Polymer Rechargeable Battery

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86927 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: RCA
• Model: RD2850
• Number of items: 1

Features

• 1.8-inch HDD - 20 gigabyte capacity
• FM Record MP3 Encoding
• USB 2.0 Connectivity
• Playback support for multiple codecs - MP3 - MP3Pro - WMA
• Backlit graphic display

Amazon.com Product Description
Take your music collection with you anywhere with the RCA Lyra RD2850 hard-drive digital audio player, which can store 5,000 CD-quality songs (MP3 files encoded at 128 kbps) on its 20 GB hard drive. Amazingly slim at just 1 inch thick, it also weighs only 3.4 ounces. It plays both MP3 and WMA formats, as well as Secure WMA files offered by online download services. It also features an FM tuner with the capability of recording programming with the touch of a single button. Recorded audio files are saved and stored in MP3 format for uploading to a PC. It has a large, easily readable 2.1-inch LCD.

The Lyra DJ feature creates an automatic smart playlist that contains related types of music. It uses the PC to analyze your music collection based on mathematical audio analysis and neural network learning to create groups of musically-related playlists that can easily be transferred to the RD2850. With the SmartTrax navigation feature, you can easily browse audio files according to artist, album, genre, year or song title. Songs can be tagged as "dislike" during playback for editing or deleting later. The player has several EQ presets, including bass boost, rock, pop, and jazz, as well as a user-configurable equalizer setting.

The RD2010 is designed to be PlaysForSure-verified out of the box and works seamlessly with Windows Media Player 10, including support for Auto Sync to sync your music, photos and playlists. You can choose from a growing number of PlaysForSure download and subscription stores, such as F.Y.E (For Your Entertainment), MSN Music, Musicmatch, MusicNow, Napster, and Wal-Mart Music Downloads.

What's in the Box
RCA Lyra RD2850 player, AC adapter, USB cable, line-out cable, car adapter kit, clip earphones, and CD-ROM with Lyra Jukebox and MusicMatch Jukebox software.

Choose your music. Choose your device. Know it's going to work. Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you're shopping for a portable music or video device and you want to make sure the digital music and video you purchase will play back on it every time. Match the PlaysForSure logo on a large selection of leading devices and online music stores. If you see the logo, you'll know your digital music will play for sure. The PlaysForSure logo makes it easy to find digital media stores and devices that work together. Choose from a large number of digital music and video stores, including CinemaNow, MSN Music, MusicMatch, MusicNow, Napster, Wal-Mart Music Downloads, and many more. Look for the PlaysForSure logo on a wide variety of devices including portable music devices, portable video devices, digital audio receivers, Pocket PC's and Smartphones. The checkmarks indicate if the device is capable of playing back audio and/or video that's been downloaded from an online store. Additionally some devices will be able to play back media that has been purchase through an online store that offers subscription or rentals.

Customer Reviews

A solid HDD Audio player
Had I not been able to resolve several issues that did come up in using the player initially, I would consider the RD2850 a below average player. As it is, I would consider it a solid audio file player with a few limitations.

As I was searching for a hard disk digital audio player, I noticed the Lyra RD2850 came with everything you need to use it universally: ear clips, rca connector for stereos, car adapter kit, and usb to connect to your computer. This and the size and weight were major motivating factors which resulted in my purchase. Some of the other hard drive MP3 players force you to purchase these items separately, and virtually all of them are larger and heavier than the Lyra.

Unfortunately, upon purchasing my Lyra and loading it with music files, I discovered a few problems.

Problem 1 - many of my WMA files wouldn't play. Apparently, the Lyra is not compatible with WMA files created by Media Player 10, which included those purchased from Microsoft's music download service.
Solution - I had to burn all those WMAs and rip them as MP3s.

Problem 2 - when jogging the player would give me a fatal error and shut down. It would then take several minutes to reload. Since my primary use of the player was for exercise this was an issue.
I called RCA, and was told to reformat the Lyra, but that didn't work, so I sent it back and received a new one within ten days. The new one was slightly better, but still gave fatal errors as I ran. I called again, explained everything, and was told that because it's a hard disk player it will have difficulty being bounced around. I wasn't excited about this explanation, but I will say that it was never difficult to reach technical support. I reached a technician within a minute on each call.
Solution - I have since found a remedy by holding the Lyra as I jog, not ideal but it works. I believe that an arm strap would probably do the trick as well.

Problems with the bundled software - MusicMatch 8.2, which comes with the Lyra, won't put any Windows Media files onto your Lyra. However, you can download Musicmatch 9 for free. My experience was that Musicmatch 9 froze up constantly when I tried to upload songs to my Lyra, besides the fact that every button I pressed seemed to give me a pop-up telling me to upgrade to MusicMatch Jukebox Plus.
Solution for me- Use the LyraSync software instead of Musicmatch.

Musicmatch is good for one thing, if you pay for the twenty-dollar upgrade. If you have old MP3s with no ID3 tag, it will find them and tag them for you very quickly. I decided it was worth it, because the Lyra groups the songs into categories from the ID3 tag.

Overall, I decided that I could handle all of these issues and I love the sound of the player.

Pros
Many accessories
Great sound
Windows treats the Lyra like an extra disk drive, so you can quickly copy any song (or other file for that matter) to it.
Decent Technical Support
Size and weight (small and light)

Cons
Shuts down with a fatal error when jogging (unless held by hand).
Not compatible with WMAs made by Media Player 10
Bundled software (MusicMatch) isn't very useful

Space, Size, and Solid
I had spent over 3 months researching players and finally settled on the RCA2850. There isn't much bad to say about this model, although a few things kept it from getting 5 stars. My principle concern was space and having 20Gb makes the difference. I've got over 1200 songs on it already and still have over 14Gb to spare. Keep in mind however, the majority of my music is ripped 128K WMA. I've found MP3 at the same rate to be slightly more expensive spacewise, and I personally haven't noticed a sound quality difference. So obviously higher bitrates will result in more used space.

Physically, the construction is solid. Metal is the primary material (instead of cheaper plastic) and the controls don't feel flimsy. The one minus is that sometimes it takes a few times for the control to register with the player. Don't know if it's a firmware or a hardware issue, but every now and then it can become annoying. The size surprised me. It's much smaller than I would've thought and I am very happy with it.

Integration with PC. Since it's a portable HD, my PC (Windows XP) recognized as such and had no trouble dealing with it as a normal drive. Drag and drop files as you choose. Most of my music is already in folders since I've ripped my entire CD collection on it using Windows Media Player and it puts everything in self named folders. The profiling tool (either on the player itself or the software) does a GREAT job. If your tags are correct, it'll sort them all for you.

The other minus I see is that when you have so many songs and artists, navigation can slow down. Albeit, it's still easy to browse, it's just not very fast. Clearly nothing beats the iPod on physical navigation. Some pluses. The display is fantastic. It's backlit and sizable so normal sized song and artist names show entirely on the display. While playing, there is a visible progress bar that shows where you are in the song as well as time elapsed, song, artist, genre, year, format, and bitrate. All very informative. The sound quality is very good and I haven't noticed drop offs in playback versus the CD. 128K seems to be fine.

The controls. It would certainly do RCA well to include a manual as there is a bit of a learning curve. The online manual is fine, but there's something about reading a book that makes the difference. I have yet to figure out if there's a way to randomize the entire contents of the player rather than by folder (artists, genre, etc). The are some other quirks with the firmware (as probably all do). I've had it freeze up once, particularly when using the pause feature when shuffle is enabled. Again, not often enough to make you mad but sometimes enough to be annoyed.

The FM-record is a nice include. However, in practice it probably doesn't give you much considering the quality is only so-so. My primary use for it is to record songs off the radio that I want to remember to acquire. A voice recorder would do better for this purpose and another minus is no line-in functionality.

Packaging of the player is very good. RCA did well to include all of your necessary peripherals. A soft cover case, cassette adapter, audio plugs, headphones, power supply, and car power adapter, and USB cable. The cassette adapter was very cheap and did not sound good. I would recommend getting a good one. And obviously the headphones as well (as most of them are when bundled with players).

Overall, I'd highly recommend this player. If RCA could improve the navigation speed and fix some of the quirks, I would say it's right up there with the iPod (Obviously, I'm saying the iPod is the top at this point). I'd also appreciate more format support. Right now it supports WMA/Secure WMA/MP3. But if you've been agonizing over a decision, let me sway you toward this model. This choice wouldn't be good for you however if you needed line-in capability. Otherwise, go with this model.

Thomson (RCA) Lyra - Used with Linux
ok I'm using this thing in an unsupported Linux environment, but basically it works. Plug it in and it appears as a USB drive, drag and drop mp3 files onto the device. They play fine.

The battery life is good, a day's play no problem, the capacity is 20Gb and it can handle any type of file so is useful for data transfers between machines etc. It's capacity actually makes audio books worthwhile though it doesn't play Audible's .aa files.

Audio quality is very good, but the earphones you get with the device are cheap, get a decent set.

The user interface on the player kind of sucks. It profiles the M3s into genre, year, artist, album etc based on the mp3 tags, so make sure they're correct or it's a mess to use. If you use Linux, get hold of easytag and set all the tags correctly or use something like Grip which will fill the tags in from freedb.

The big niggle and why it's only getting 3 stars is that you can't play music *while it's charging*. If you try to, it crashes with loud buzzing and has to be switched off/on. It's been back to the manufacturer with the problem but it still exists. This is stupid and down to poor quality control, it makes the car charger useless and it means I can't play music while transferring stuff to it. It just doesn't multitask. Otherwise, when not charging, it's actually reasonably reliable for me. The little niggle is it can't create playlists of it's own, you have to create them on the attached system and copy them with the mp3 files, again something like easytag or rhythmbox can create playlists.