Thomson & De-Lyra (MP3 Player) (Thomson Lyra)

Member Name: indiecater

Product:	Thomson Lyra
Date:	16/01/01 (802 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Light, Compact and Upgradeable Removable Storage Capacity.

Disadvantages: Supplied Software is a bit Suspect.

Oh how I'd torn my hair out deciding whether to go for a Mini-Disk or an MP3 player. In the end I plumped for a MP3 player. Don't know why but I'm not regretting the decision yet. Seeing as the Creative Labs Jukebox was a bit expensive and heavy, I decided I'd go for a player that was small enough to carry around but had fairly a good memory capacity. Didn't like the sound of that Sony Stick effort so I chose the Thomson Lyra player which I had seen advertised on the net.

The Lyra player has a removable memory card called a Compact Flash Card (CFC) that can hold up to 64mb of songs which translates to about 20 songs or just over 1 hour of music. You can buy replacement cards and the hope is that their memory capacity will expand in time. As yet I haven't seen these cards on sale but I was told they would be in the near future.

The Lyra's screen is about the same size as a mobile phone screen and boasts a nifty inbuilt light. As such Lyra can only display about 15 characters per line but this is enough to let you know what you're listening to. The player has all the usual features that you would expect to find on a standard CD player including skip, forward, rewind, pause, repeat and adjustments to tone for the genre of music you are listening to.

The Lyra player itself is very light and small enough to fit in your pocket. There are earphones supplied but they are a bit on the clunky side. Batteries are also supplied but you need to buy a power source plug if you want the player to work off the mains. I found the playback perfect for jogging with not a skip in sight.

There is an external drive supplied which must be attached to the keyboard port for transferring PC files to the CFC. I felt the warnings about connecting the drive to the PC to be very OTT. It was a bit off-putting and at the time I thought that this process should have been easy enough for anybody to do, let alone people with a Mas
ters in IT! In reality the set-up procedure is much simpler than the supplied documentation makes out.

The external drive has a slot where the CFC is inserted. Curiously the CFC is placed in the drive with the downside facing up. I can't really understand the logic to this and this all adds to the confusion during those tentative early days.

The software supplied includes Real Player 8, which is required to transfer files from your PC to the external drive and ultimately the CFC. I've always been a bit suspicious of Real Player and I'm afraid my fears were borne out. In order to transfer files to the external drive you need to add the tracks to Real Players master library. I had downloaded a couple of tracks from Napster and when I tried to add them to the Real Player library the dreaded error box appeared. The error informed me that another device was sharing the file for audio output. The help suggests closing down all applications that are capable of audio output. This I did but the error message remained.

When I ripped tracks from a CD using Real Player there was no such problem. Once the tracks were added to the Real Player library I could easily transfer the files to the Flash Card. My own conspiracy theory is that when it looks like the authenticity of an MP3 file is in doubt Real Player wants nothing to do with it. Microsoft with their WMA format (I'm hoping against hope that this format fails to take off, long live MP3!) look like setting out to do the same thing.

Luckily I found out that the MusicMatch software was Lyra compliant once you downloaded a skin from the net. This instantly recognised my downloaded files and were transferable to the CFC. The only problem with MusicMatch was that it doesn't offer a delete function for files you want to remove from the CFC. I needed to use Real Player to do this. It's a bit of a mess really having to flip between the 2 players to get the tracks I need
onto the Lyra player but I'll cope for the moment. Hopefully MusicMatch will add the delete function with their next upgrade and I can drop Real Player altogether.

MP3 players are a relatively new medium so I was prepared for a few hitches along the way when I got the Lyra. I have a feeling that the transfer process to the CFC could be off putting for some people. At £199 it is not cheap. This price is likely to drop and I have since seen cheaper prices for the player on the Net.

I found the Thomson-Lyra website a little underwhelming, lacking any sort of meaningful tips or information not supplied in the manual. Overall then, just about a thumbs up. The Lyra is probably as good as you'll get in this class of MP3 player at the moment. The wise ones amongst you will probably wait for six months for the next generation of MP3 players!

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