Beloved mp3 player... still alive.

Although a dinosaur in the iPod generation, I do like my tunes. By todays standards, my mp3 player is ancient and obsolete. But it does its job, and I like it. In fact, I like it so much, I dread the day that it no longer works.

That day was almost yesterday. I have an RCA Lyra RD1028A. I think I bought it before apple even came out with iPod. At the time there was a lot of competition about mp3 players as they were just becoming a hot market item. My Lyra is really quite rugged and comes with an arm band that can be used for jogging. It only has 128mb internal storage, but has a very useful SD memory card slot. It takes a single AAA battery, and connects to the computer thru a USB slot (in the player). I stress the last point, because it doesn't need a special cable. It can use any USB-mini cable out there.

When it plugs into the computer, it mounts two drives, one for the internal storage, and one for the SD card (if it is in the device). This is especially important to me, as I dont want to be forced to run proprietary software in order to put songs on the device. Its also useful because it is essentially a card reader, and my wife uses it to transfer pictures more easily from the SD card that is in our camera.

The AAA battery (I use rechargeable ones, and charge them in a wall charger) can run the player for about a week with my usual usage. In solid runtime it would probably got for about 8 to 12 hours, but thats a guess.

The audio quality is excellent. Although the interface and audio options are quite basic. I cant store my entire music collection on it, but in reality I dont want to listen to my entire music collection. Most of it is junk. I just want 60 or so songs on it that I know I currently like. I switch out different songs to it on a semi-regular basis. Works well for me, and I think I paid $50 or $60 for it.

In short, it works, and it works good. But yesterday, it stopped working. It starting behaving strangely and when I turned it off and replaced the battery, it wouldn't turn back on. Actually, it turned on, but couldn't get past the 'RCA' screen which normally only lasts about 5 seconds.

I plugged it in to the computer and immediately could see that the partition label was no longer there, but I could see songs. I tried copying some different songs over, and it got thru a couple of them before I started getting IO errors.

I also noticed that the settings.dat file only had 6 bytes in it. I was pretty sure it was at least 200 bytes normally.

I did plenty of googling, searching for a fancy button pressing combination that restores everything to the factory settings, but couldn't find anything except for a lot of people who also had similar problems, with no solution.

So with a beating heart, I formatted the drive (for the device) and then copied some songs over, without getting any errors. I unplugged it from the computer and turned it on. About 10 seconds later, my speakers were once again filled with rich sound.

After finding no good answers on the internet, I was ready to throw it away, but then thought I'd give it one last desperate try, and am ever so grateful that I did.

So to everyone else. If you have an RCA Lyra RD1028A and it gets stuck starting up. Plug it into your computer and format it. It just might work.