Sony MZNH600D Hi-MD Mini Disc Walkman Digital Music Player

Rating:
Summary: More than expected.
Review: At this price (below $170) Hi-MD is a beast! The unit is so light that I carry it everywhere even without headphones just for the sole purpose of data exchange. It is so much geeker than those pen-drives. And for few bucks I can buy a bunch of old, dirt cheap MD disks.
The only one thing I can not understand in this business is why Sony is not pushing this product as much as it deserves???
For music I am mostly using MD's copied on my stereo, so the software does not hurt this much.

Rating:
Summary: very good sony!
Review: i bought this player a few days ago and it is awesome. i curently already had sonic stage 2.0 version on my computer and over 3,000 songs in my library. all i had to do is install the new software so that my hi md player would be recognized by the 2.0 software. it was very simple to do. then i just started transfering all the music that i wanted onto the 1gb mini disc. i did not finish cuz the storage is enormous. so then i just went on and played the song that were in it already. you can always go back and transfer more if you want to or try to fill the disc in one day if you have the time. the only thing is where do i go to buy more blank 1gb minidiscs? sony.com has them for $6.99 a piece but they do not ship to p.o. boxes. so for now i can use the 80 min minidiscs which can store 13.5 hours of music which is incredible cuz the other minidiscs players can only hold 5 hours and the sound is not as good as the hi-md player is a lot better. if you are looking for something not too expensive and do not want to be limited to memory card players or skipping hard drive players, go with this sony. you wont regret it!

Rating:
Summary: I own other Sony NetMDs and have advice to avoid software
Review: I don't own the HiMD Mindisc yet, although I look forward
to buying one eventually, but I keep reading of people
having problems with Sony's awful included OpenMG software
(I find it's horrible, and lately RealOne Player is crashing
on me when I try to transfer Mp3s to the NetMDs I own,
which are an mzn505 and a 410 (the no frills black one).
So I had to find a better solution for mp3 files or other
pc music files, the SimpleBurner Sony gives you is fine for
CDs....then I found out you can just compile a CD "Image"
if you have a burner like NERO, which I've got...what you do is,
just burn a CD image from Nero or another burning suite,
save to HD, mount the image as a regular "CD," THEN open
Sony's SimpleBurner and burn the Image, it will recognize it,
then you just burn to the NetMD and let it rip..I think
you can even specify space between tracks before you burn
the Image. This seems to work TONS better than Sony's crappy
software, which everyone seems to despise, and who wants
to record in real time unless you have to? Plus it burns
10x faster this way on a newer PC with USB 2.0, so it's the
method of choice. You can tell me IPOD but that is super
expensive, it's not for archiving music or burning as the
NetMD is, and now the HiMD will even do data files, so it
should probably save the Sony NetMD line for the near
future..I sure hope so cause I love the NetMD format,
it's just Sony's support and junky software that is a
major glitch in the product's marketing. Why doesn't Sony
fix this? It can't be that hard to come up with a better
suite of software, and SimpleBurner itself is fine!

Rating:
Summary: incredible player, mediocre software
Review: I have had mine for about 2 weeks. The battery performance is less than the netmd players, but that came as no surprise. the included headphones are cheap. The storage is incredible. On my 1.2gig computer, transfer with conversion to atracIIIplus takes about 5 min per cd, which is not bad at all. Probably the most pleasant surprise i've had out of this thing is the data storage. My internet connection is horrible, so I can't always upload large files that I need at school or work. I can put the files on a hd disc at home, go to school and plug it into any computer (windows xp) and the player is automatically recognized and set up as an external harddrive. that comes out to a very affordable 1gig+ portable harddrive!!! AtracIIIplus at 64kbps is blind test rated slightly better than 128k mp3, and I totally agree. with around 32 cd's on a disc, the sound quality is very nice, listening to mostly classical and a bit of rock. buy this over an Ipod, like i did, and save some money without losing much more than fancy looks and headphones.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of bang for the buck.
Review: I have had this unit for 2 weeks and love it. It comes with all of the features that last years higher net-md players came with, including EQ, remote output (no remote though) and easy to navigate mini joystick and jog dial. First thing I did was go to Sony's Connect website and download the latest version of SonicStage. It installed perfectly, saving all of the play lists I have accumulated from my Net-MD Walkman which used SonicStage 1.0.

It works great for ripping songs from CD; it's fairly fast. It has a CD info database that blows away Windows Media Player's, no matter how obscure the title.

I was able to fit all 200 CD's, over 2000 songs onto 4 HI-MDs and 2 80 minutes discs, one for each genre of music. They all fit neatly into a compact 5 disc case.

I plugged the remote that cane with my MZ-N10, and it works great. I can easily change play modes and skip tracks with it.

The problems I had are:

Ultra slow MP3 conversion; it takes SonicStage hours to convert a whole HI-MD disc worth of Mp3's.

No song export from HI-MD disc; if you try to transfer a song from the recorder to SonicStage it will erase the track from the recorder, and disappear from the music library, possibly to a temp folder some where. (Just checked, they did get exported but are in a folder called Optimized Files, not to the music library like where they were supposed to go.)

Finally, the discs are hard to come by, I tried 3 vendors and all were out of the discs.

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: I owned a minidisc player a while back (specifically, the Sony MZ-N510CK NetMD Walkman) and I had mixed feelings about it. First, the storage on the minidiscs wasn't the greatest - one could fit maybe two hours of music on it with the 150-megabyte discs. Second, I always found it odd you couldn't write other media to the discs, like documents and pictures. And I was disapointed that there wasn't a wider range in bit rates you could rip music from using Sony's Sonicstage. While the atrac compression format gives excellent sound - better, in my opinion, than any mp3 - I wished they would give more options. All in all, I didn't feel that the player was worth it. But then I found that Sony was relasing a new line of minidisc players, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

It was worth it.

First, the new discs hold an incredible one gigabyte of information. I have fit almost 240 songs onto a disc at the 132 bit rate. Also, you can now use the players to back up your information. The old minidiscs that only held 150 megabytes, in the new players, are reformatted to hold 300 megabytes. I use my old ones to back up my documents and pictures - I haven't touched my CD burner in months! And there are new bit rates to choose from. It isn't as wide a selection as with mp3 rippers, but the extra choice is nice. The transfer of info using my USB 2.0 is quick and easy.

Sadly, as other reviewers have mentioned, the new Sonicstage software is a pain to use. I never had any problems with the old Sonicstage program, but for some reason the new version is extremely buggy and irritating. Additionally, don't be fooled by the packaging - while sonicstage does recognize mp3 and wma format, when you try to transfer the songs to your discman it will convert them to atrac format beforehand.

All in all, if you're leary of investing your money in a hardrive-based mp3 player, as I was, this is an excellent alternative. I am very satisfied with the product.

Rating:
Summary: Simply the best way of carrying music
Review: Ipods are cool and have a lot of capacity, but expensive and the battery doesn't last much.
Solid-state players are cool, but storage is bloody expensive, and battery doesn't last much either.
CD/MP3 players are cheap but bulky, do not double as portable storage and you need a burner.
PDAs are convenient because you only carry one thing, but have expensive storage and short battery life.

This little thing can store 35 CDs with pretty good quality on 1 minidisc, will run over 25 hours on just 1 humble regular AA battery; I use rechargeables which last even longer. It is great as portable storage and backup tool since you can have several discs. I am in Toronto and buy them at the Sony shop in Yorkdale mall, but you can also get them from Futureshop or Sonystyle.ca.

Sound is very good, probably like a 128 Kbps MP3. It has a 5-band customizable equalizer.

Only cons: I installed Sonicstage on 3 PCs: it refuses to work on one of them, other than that it's ok. Also, you can't copy back music from a minidisc to a different PC.

My advice: go get it.


Rating:
Summary: great..
Review: the player itself is great and all that blabla... but I just have to point out sonys software (like a lot of us :))

ive been trying to get sonicstage to work for days.. at first when I installed it, everything was ok. and when I ran it, it said that I had an old version so it wants to update (it wasnt a must) so silly me, I did as it asked. the next thing I know (after installing for 10 minutes) it had a file missing.. now how could that happen? I only used original software and there is sth missing.. anyway, its openMG. www.openmg.com is down too. cant get that thing from nowwhere.

so any suggestons on how to solve this, mail me [e-mail]
the full name that it needed was "openmg secure module.msi"

Rating:
Summary: Buy it
Review: This is a fantastic device. I love the fact that you can transfer music from your cd right onto the MD player without converting it to an MP3 (or similar file) first. Not to mention that Sony's proprietary ATRAC files have been proven to sound better than MP3s that take up more memory. The transfer rate is actually suprisingly fast. 1GB of disk space is more than enough to fill your head with tons of songs. Not to mention that the player is infinitely expandable since you CAN buy more disks. I bought this player on June 31st 2004 and was able to buy extra 1GB disks right from www.sony.com (no problem with availability either... and they shipped it to me overnight for the same cost as ground shipping). So ignore the hype about availability or lack there of and dive on in on machine. You won't regret it.

Rating:
Summary: Nice System, but what is SONY thinking?
Review: This Player is very nice and capacity is OK for a removable media, however the whole Hi-MD---OpenMG----SonicStage---ATRAC is very inconvenient to use.

I will summarize:

PROS:

-ATRACplus algorithm sound decent at 64kbps, comparable to MP3 at 128kbps in my opinion. There is also a 256kbps option which sounds very good, but files are pretty big for the Hi-MD capacity, makes it inconvenient.
-The advertised price for the Hi-MD blank disks is ok, around $7.
-Price compares to that of the MiniIpod or some Flash MP3 players, however this is "supposed" (read below) to be upgradeable by buying more blank Hi-MDs
-Runs on AA battery.
-You can run with it and get no skips.

CONS:

-You MUST use SonicStage software to transfer files to / from the MD.
-No MP3 support on the unit, only plays ATRAC. MP3s are transcoded by the PC software.
-SonicStage is a little bit unreliable.
-You CAN NOT upload songs from MD to your PC. So you can't use the MDs as a backup of your PC music collection, because if your PC fails, you can't upload the songs again.
-Even if you encode songs in ATRACplus with SonicStage, you can't move the files to another PC. And I'm not talking about illegal moving, you might have more than one PC.
-You can only play (so far) ATRACplus files with Sony's software (in your PC, I mean).
-Hi-MD blank discs are scarce, not even sony online store has them in stock at the moment of this review.

I think this unit is a good alternative to a Flash based MP3 player of medium capacity (256-512MB) if you can find it for less than $200.

For a little more than this you can get a 4/5 GB HD player like the MiniIpod and save the hassle of the propietary format, algorithm, rights protection format (OpenMG) and having only one choice of software.

I think Sony could have made a good product but it's taking the wrong path towards protection of copyrights. They shouln't do so at the expense of reducing the product functionality and reliability.