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Windows Media Player 10 Stuff

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So I've been playing with the Windows Media Player 10 Technical Beta and it's pretty impressive. I haven't owned a dedicated MP3 player since I sold all my Macs and iPod last year, and so I was interested to see how the new media player would work with one. I dropped by Radio Shack today and spent 89 dollars on an RCA Lyra. I chose that model because it was on the list of devices that supported Auto Sync and because it had a slot for an SD card. I got the player home, hooked it up to my PC, and installed the latest firmware. I was then pleasantly surprised to find that I didn't have to install any drivers on the PC to get the player recognized. I added a 256 meg SD card and I was able to Auto Sync my 4 and 5 star playlist easily.

As far as the device goes, it's really tiny. I was interested in experimenting with the idea that we would all be using multiple devices, depending on what we were doing, in the near future. I can buy into that. This player is about 2 ounces. I carry a gig and a half worth of music and video on my Pocket PC, but that machine is something like 12 ounces, and so it's not really convenient for working out. The Lyra seems like a perfect size and weight for the gym.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2004
    ...and keep switching those SD cards...
  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2004
    Yes. I think that's the point though. I'll probably pick up a much larger machine in the future to carry all my digital media with me. It would be great if that device (right now it's a tablet) could write to the SD card so that I can switch to the smaller device when appropriate. :)

    Cheers,

    Brian
  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2004
    you sold an ipod for an RCA Lyra.... wonderful...
    I sometimes wonder what this world is coming to when people would rather go back to the old days and copy single tracks.... You could have just organized your playlist in the ipod to play all your 4 or 5 star songs....or used iTunes for Windows.... what the heck....
  • Anonymous
    June 07, 2004
    You can already get 1GB SD cards, and the price of these things comes down all the time. I can remember a time when even 16MB cards were prohibitively expensive - now they're almost giving them away in cereal boxes.

    Speaking personally, I keep a "Favorites" playlist going (106 songs, 618MB, 7.6hrs) and would love to be able to just copy the latest version of this to a card which went into a small, lightweight player that I wouldn't hate to lose.
  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2004
    To be clear, I didn't sell the iPod for the Lyra. I sold the iPod last year because I sold the Macs. At the time the iPod didn't work that well with PCs. I started using my Pocket PC as my music player instead. I'll probably buy a dedicated music player with a 20/40 gig drive sometime soon.

    This little tiny player is pretty nice for what it is though.

    Cheers,

    Brian
  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2004
    Yes, I was thinking the same thing about Sync and Go in Windows Media Plus Pack. I would love to be able to stick a media card in and have the card automatically updated with the latest news. :)

    Cheers,

    Brian
  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2004
    Anyone with an idea why Media Player cannot automatically install/ship with codecs for DivX?

    It's probably the most popular format out there...

    /S