I decided to create this blog for several reasons. I have a lot of techie widgets around, many of which I acquired out of curiosity and then discovered are essentially obsolete. This blog will be a repository for them as I jettison them, thus serving as a warning to the foolish and aberrant who might trifle with them in the future.
The RCA Lyra K@zoo RD1000 is an MP3 player released around 2000. It has a base memory of 32MB and can accommodate up to a 64MB MMC Plus card to max out at 96MB. For an MP3 player of its time, it was relatively decent and had several nice features, including a 5-mode digital equalizer and quite passable sound quality. I picked mine up about a week ago for $2.99 from Value Village on Lake City Way.
Why is it now obsolete? Well, tinkerers have managed to get it to work with up to 2GB MMC cards, but there are three major reasons to consider it obsolete: 1. It requires MusicMatch Jukebox to add / delete / modify its contents; 2. it's USB 1.1, which means you'll be feeling your hair grow while it loads and, 3. it has to transcode the files via MusicMatch Jukebox) you want to put on it to a proprietary .mpy format (likely to prevent dreaded 'piracy' of its contents) and this amounts to as much time as it took to initially encode the mp3 file, plus the time it takes to transfer it via USB 1.1.
Models of the Lyra that appeared just after the RD1000 have the ability to upgrade firmware, some to the point one can simply drag & drop mp3 files to them as a standard USB Mass Storage device.
With this, I say farewell to the RD1000.
