RCA Lyra RD2201
It would be quite a few years before the bigger names in consumer electronics jumped into the portable media player market. The earliest devices came from from smaller brands, although RCA (Thomson Consumer Electronics) arrived at the table early with its 32MB Lyra RD2201. (The Lyra RD2204 came with 64MB of memory.) The device looked like a generic digital voice recorder, but innovated through the use of Compact Flash cards for storing music.
The Lyra was also the first MP3 player with updatable software that could be downloaded from the internet, and in order to keep the RIAA and its complaints of piracy at bay, the Lyra relied on a proprietary card reader and software that converted audio files to encrypted versions as they were copied to the player, preventing them from being easily copied off onto another PC.
