From what I can see of the specs for this though it only records mp3 or WMA, not WAV?

Bob.

Along with wireless mics I also use an Olympus DM-20 to assist in recording events. I also purchase a Sony ECM-CS10 mic to improve the quality. The DM-20 is very light, compact, and built to take abuse. The DM-20 creates a WMA file. Initially I purchased it for backup audio purposes, however, I usually end up using the the audio from the DM-20. The DM-20 costs about $200 and the mic was about $30.

Does the lyra record analog or spdif ?

I've started looking at this kind of thing ever since I started playing around with my ultra tiny Panasonic AV-100 mpeg2 video camera. The picture is just average for a consumer camera but the audio is better than most consumer video cams because of the lack of motor noise. For serious work, it seems that a good chip audio recorder would be pretty cool. I've been looking at the Edirol R-1 and R-4 in particular.

In a related subject, in reading the specs, the new Sony Z-1 has time stamped clips whereas the FX-1 does not. It seems to me that the ideal would be a little wave recorder that recorded time stamped waves to make syncing the video and external audio easier. Can Vegas sync time stamped audio and video like FCP does? Are there any small audio recorders that can record time stamped audio?

Spot,
Have you seen the user reviews on that device? They seem mixed.

John

I have a iRiver IHP-120 that I do the same thing with all the time. It's a great little player...and recorder!

Tahnks for the pointers on the reviews. I'm going to check it out anyway...but don't know if I'll buy one. I just need a new WMA player that's got some space. 512 meg just doesn't cut it any longer.

I have a Lyra Jukebox player. Mine is not a recorder it is the RD2825, 20 gig MP3 player. They use to make a 40gig model also, I believe RD2840 is the 40 gig model. The one you have shown records through a line IN to MP3 format. I love my Lyra, I got it for a steal on a clearance price of $100 at Sam's club. The nice things about the Lyra is that it is a Hard drive. You basically plug it into your PC's USB port and it gets recognized as a removable hard drive. You can therefore drag any files from your PC and store it on the Lyra and easily use it as a transfer device. It automatically gets recognized with any PC with Win2k and WinXP, just by pluging it into the USB port, no additional drivers to install. My Laptops HD is pretty full. So, I have used Sound Forge on my Laptop and directly recorded to 16bit/44.1 stereo .WAV format onto the Lyra with no problems, since it's USB2.0 compliant. The Lyra won't playback the .Wav files, it only playsback MP3, MP3pro and WMA files. You can playback the files on it, using the Software on your laptop, so in other words playback with SF. I believe for the video one you've shown it plays Mpeg format for the video files. For MP3 files you just drag them over to the Lyra into a designated "MUSIC" folder and the Lyra can then play them. You can also create playlists using Windows Media Player and save them as the M3U playlist file, and the Lyra can play those as well.

Aside from a much cheaper price, I prefer it to the iPod because it doesn't do any file converstions of the WMA and MP3 files and like I said, it's a pretty nice compact Hard drive for temporary storage and transfering of large files from PC to PC. I love mine, it has a direct lineout, and a seperate headphone digital volume controled out. I use it regularly on camping get togethers where I get to play DJ and the Lyra does a great job as a jukebox. I ran out of songs before I ran out of space on it so far. Probably have close to 10K worth of songs on it, right now encoded at 192Kbs MP3. I feed it into an external input in my car stereo system, and haven't had a need to use my CD player in a year now and no longer have CDs floating around my interior. I now just have DVD's floating around since I also added an external video input into my touchscreen navigational head unit. I'm thinking about buying one of those Playstation steering wheel controlers for my actual steering wheel for my car now, so I can do PS2 action while stuck in rush hour traffic.....now that ought to be safe huh!? Oh yeah, and it all plays in surround via a Logic 7 decoder amplifier.

The quality of MP3 has also improved in the past few years. There's now lossless MP3 codecs that sound great. WMA is getting better, too.
The Mobile Media Devices coming out will be killer for us video people. Personally, I want more people to want to play the videos I make for them... as much as possible... to as many people as possible....with my logo and phone number at the beginning and end!

There's now lossless MP3 codecs that sound great
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I'm not sure it's really lossless. The best I have heard recently that is actually lossless is FLAC. There are lots of archived concerts,etc using this free codec.
A two hour concert can be compressed into around an 850MB FLAC file which can be downloaded and played in WINAMP or converted into wave files using the free FLAC frontend. Then they can be burned into a CD.

John