Rating: 
Summary: The Value Leader
Review: I recently purchased one of these units. Being a minidisc fan and having many of the higher end recorders, I prefer to pack this one around with me to listen to discs with. First of all it is cheap. You can purchase one for under $75.00 at most places, even pawnshops have it for around $50.00. If you drop it as I have many times, it usually just bounces and still runs, and if it quits, you can once again purchase another for dirt cheap, rather than risk trashing out a $300.00 machine by daily use. Second, it has a lot more user-settable features than meets the casual eye. You can set preset equalizer positions the way you like your music, rather than what the factory thinks you may like. I have no complaints about cheap button feel, they work fine and dandy to me. Although this unit comes with no remote, that means one less thing to either lose or trash. It has no provisions for an AC adaptor power, but with a quality NiMh rechargeable battery of at least 1600 mAh, you can get several days of play and several discs of recording done. The software is buggy and funky and has a long learning curve to it, but once learnt, it is fairly easy to use. The quick burn feature is super fast, and directly burns from CD to minidisc without the hassle of transferring the music first to yout computer hard drive. It's disadvantage is that you cannot use it to burn in Standard Play mode. The Sonic Stage software is fairly straightforward, although it keeps track of how many times you transfer a song and limits you to only three transfers for each song. You "check in" and "check out" music like you are borrowing from Sony's personal library! Leave it to Sony to attempt to preserve their music empire! Leave it to me to devise a way to get around that little annoyance! A major thing I dont like about the Sonic Stage software is that you cannot directly burn from CD to Minidisc as you can with the quick launch program. the Sonic Stage automatically creates an album file on the "music drive" of your hard drive no matter what you do. Just delete it afterwards, and that fixes prob. Re Record to "music drive" to restore, and also restore the count and how many times you can "check out" a song:) One advantage of the Sonic Stage software over the Real Player software is that Sony will not clog your emails with spam like Real.com does, also the Sonic Stage does not go "obsolete" every six months like the Real Player does, demanding you to buy the "improved" version:) As for the quantity of data that can be put on one minidisc, it is incredible. I recently transferred all seven of the early Moody Blues albums on one 80 minute minidisc, with room left over! The machine fits in your shirt pocket, you can sit on it and it still works. It is miserly with battery power and you dont have to have a custom battery. Dollar for dollar it will spoil you, and it will wean you from the plethora of mp3 players out there.
Rating:
Summary: Great player
Review: This player sounds great and holds a lot of songs. I compressed the files that I put on the minidisc to LP4. I thought I would loose quality in the music...was I wrong. The songs still sound great even though they are now at LP4. And best of all, I can fit nearly 75 songs (most of them 4 minutes or longer) on an 80-minute disc. Easy to use. However, the headphones that come with the player are horrible. They sound horrible and fall off to easily. I would highly recomend buying different headphones like Sennheiser PX 100. This thing also doesn't waste batteries, I have listened to this player for 50 hours at least and the battery meter is still at 1/4!
Rating:
Summary: I love it!!!
Review: I bought this the other day. Had been wanting a mp3 player but figured that this was really what I what I was wanting. I have put on and taken off quite a bit of music on this device and the battery consumption has not even moved a bit. I am using Realplayer to move files to and from device due to ease. I found that the software bundled was ripping music from cd's too fast which created interference in the music so I just used another ripper and imported to device format with no problems. The sound is great although I have replaced the headphones for better quality. I love the idea that I can put a heck of alot of music of one variety on one disk and if I want to listen to another kind of music, I just put another disk of a ton of music of another kind in. Would have liked it to have come with some kind of belt clip or something of that nature but I will adjust. I know that there are armbands out there that will work. I know that these kind of players are not as popular as mp3 players with a hard drive but I love this device.
Rating: 
Summary: I love this unit
Review: Pay no attention to the naysayers. A little research will do wonders to alleviate the mentioned problems. This is a great beginners MiniDisc unit. It's small, the battery life is outstanding, and the format just cannot be beat. If you're curious about Minidisc, then this is an excellent way to try it out. It's not packed with features, hence the 4 stars, but there are no major complaints.
Rating:
Summary: Love the player
Review: This is a great player. The changing of disc I see as sort of a nice feature, I think some others might disagree. Great sound solid overall only problems are digital rights management and proprietary software(not bad software but still proprietary). I would still recommend it very highly and you can't beat the price.
Rating:
Summary: so cool, we bought two!
Review: When my fragile Rio 800 finally passed away this past winter, I thought I'd die too. Once you've experienced the freedom of a small portable player for all your music and audiobooks, it's pretty hard to go back to lugging a regular CD player around with you. My husband tried to console me with a new blue Sony Psyc with an intriguing belt-pack rig for sort of wearing it around--nice for the gym and walking and all--but it still seemed kind of cumbersome. It didn't seem possible that this minidisc thing could possibly do all it says it does for the price, but my son wanted one so I bought it for him; in less than five minutes we'd installed the software and recorded a couple of cd's onto it. This was yesterday early afternoon; the sound was so fantastic that we immediately ordered a package of minidiscs from Amazon so we could, like, theoretically, SHARE the player, you know? Note that the minidiscs are RE-recordable; you can use them over and over, but of course it would be nice to have several. Incredibly, the discs arrived this afternoon, not twenty-four hours after I'd ordered them, and I did not even pay any extra shipping. Amazon, your service is incredible. In the meantime, I went out and bought another player for myself to use, since my son seems to be permanently attached to his, and at this price, we can each afford to have our own. If you are on the fence about ordering this item, our advice is for you to go for it--you will be very happy with the sound quality (depending on your headphones of course). The headphones that come with it are not the greatest, but we didn't expect them to be; the NetMD easy burn software is indeed amazingly easy to use. We haven't fooled with the other software because we don't seem to need it. Chances are you already have software that will work fine. All we've done so far is copy onto the minidiscs CD's we've made from iTunes etc. and it all works great. Note each minidisc holds a lot more music than a regular CD. The player uses only one plain ol' double AA battery, which will last a long time. None of this ridiculous rechargeable battery-only setup like my poor Rio (snifff) which I suspect was the source of its trouble. That also means you can use the player right out of the package because you don't have to charge it up in advance. There's only one thing missing, and that's the availability of a case with a belt clip. There isn't one available. But the player is so small you can easily fit it in your shirt pocket or somewhere. I'm knitting a little case with a strap for mine, but I'll be on the lookout for something with a belt clip, because I know I'm going to want to use it when I'm out in the garden this summer...if summer ever comes, that is. Treat yourself to this player. If you have been through MP3 player heck, you deserve it.
Rating:
Summary: Great product but it's not what you might think
Review: This net md player is not a bad little unit, but there are some misconceptions that need to be cleared up (based on some of the reviews). First, this unit in fact does NOT play any other file format other than ATRAC3 (uncompressed, LP2, or LP4). The packaging, advertisements, etc, all claim that it supports mp3, wma, wave, etc. This is NOT really the case. Basically, the SOFTWARE will let you use any of those file types as SOURCE files, but when you 'burn' them to MD, it will convert everything to ATRAC3 (using the compression format you specify, one of three options: miminal, medium lp2, or high lp4 compression). Second, it's unfortunate that Sony has to install so many different software components on your computer in order for this thing to work. I do not like to have my add/remove programs cluttered with extra junk, and this will do it. There is no real custom install, it's all or nothing. When it's done you'll have about 5 extra software pieces in your 'add/remove' programs list. Grrr. How annoying. Also, do yourself a favor and download the free realplayer program (and sony devices plugin). I've never been a fan of real player, but after you experience the included SonicStage software, you will think that RealPlayer is code Nirvana :) All in all, a very good deal. It's a high quality piece and the highest ATRAC3 compression (LP4) sounds as good if not better than 128kbps mp3. But make no mistake, this is NOT a device that can play mp3s (or wave files, or wma files for that matter), it can only play ATRAC3, a proprietary alternative. Prepare to sit through some re-encoding periods (about 30 minutes to "burn" 50 tracks from mp3 format because of the re-encoding to ATRAC3). Would I recommend? Definitely, but only to someone who wants a personal music player for themselves. You can't really use this unit to transport files back and forth between PCs, or share mp3s with friends, you'll need a 'real' mp3 player to do that. . .
Rating:
Summary: This player is GREAT -- the only choice for trance/DJ music
Review: For those of you who enjoy split songs and recordings (i.e., one recording or song that has been split up into several tracks -- DJ sets and classical pieces come to mind), this player KICKS THE CRAP out of the competition!!! This is the only one I've tried that doesn't have that annoying pause in between the tracks (files), so it's great for long classical pieces (i.e., The Rite of Spring, Firebird, Also Sprach Zarathustra, etc.) and DJ set recordings (i.e., Dimitri From Paris "Night at the Playboy Mansion" and "Disco Forever", Marquez Wyatt stuff, etc.). To the best of my knowledge, not even the IPOD can compete with that. As far as everything else goes (sound quality, ease of use, portability, etc.), this thing is awesome!!! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!
Rating:
Summary: Dropped on concrete floor and it WORKS!!!
Review: Prior to buying my MD at BestBuy, I tired the IRIVER MP3 PLAYER and the newest RCA LYRA 128MB PLAYER...the IRIVER is operated by a JOYSTICK (so hard to navigate) and it is cheaply made! Software is horrible. With the RCA the USB PORT on my comp could not detect the player..and you had to upload some software on the RCA WEBSITE (and they neglected to include this info. in the phamplets that came with the player). It took a million yrs for RCA technical help to get back to me..and NO SOLUTION! so HERE COMES THE SONY MD! in silver......MY REVIEWS DESIGN >>> NO JOY STICK! so it makes it very EASY to navigate around (using the easy to punch buttons), and with a joy stick (how players are made these days) you worry about it breaking off. You can blindly reach into your bag, or while running on the treadmilll and easily navigate. DURABILITY >>> I dropped this thing on CONCRETE FLOOER and it worked right after..NO PROBLEMS! Shoved into small pockets, threw it into a napsack etc... This thing is DURABLE! TRANSFER OF MUSIC >>> It can basically transfer ANYTHING, I have no problems thus far. You have to buy discs to transfer you music, but it only cost about $2/each for a disc and they sell them in a pack. Approx. 50-60 song per disc...at HIGH QUALITY. The AA battery lasted me A LONG TIME (3 weeks, with at least 1HR use everyday)..and you only need one battery. SOFTWARE >>> Very easy to navigate around, as long as you use the instruction booklet..its a go. And I am comp. illterate. ACCESSORIES >>> It would be awesome if it came with a carrying case to clip on the waist,or a wrist band holder...it makes it easier to run with it. Comes with headphones..but, you need to buy the DISCS. overall >>> sure its not as SNAZY AS THE MP3..but you have the luxury of saving your songs on hard disc...like a cd..and on top of that GOOD QUALITY SOUND, NO PROBLEMS WITH TRANSFER OF TRACKS..and pretty good SOFTWARE!
Rating: 
Summary: Great hardware -- pitiful software
Review: My high hopes and expectations for this music player were dashed as soon as I plugged it into my PC. If you love Winamp or Media Player and are looking for an intuitive interface, you'll hate the software that comes with this fine piece of hardware. Its contrived "copy protection" is a joke and a nuisance. If I could find a third-party interface package, I'd be happy again with my Net MD.
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