Rating: 
Summary: This not an MP3 player
Review: This product is not an MP3 player, nor is it a portable CD player. It is something infinitely better and more sublime. Sony made a botch of OpenMG and it was irresponsible of them to bill the NetMD units as being MP3 players, but the N505 is still a great machine, for the same reasons that Minidisc in general is a great and unique format. Read on to find out why.Minidisc players surpass portable CD and MP3 players in several aspects: It records! This MD unit and most others are capable of recording. You can't do that with a portable CD player or most portable MP3 players. You can record live or dub other sources, anytime, anywhere, with pristine quality, different sources on one MD if you want to. You can edit the sequence and content of what you record right on the MD recorder. You can record up to 5 hours of lecture or whatever on one disc. You can record, re-record, append to, resequence, or erase minidisc media up to a MILLION times, right on the MD unit. You do not first have to encode your music with a computer. You do not even need to have a computer to enjoy MD. Sound quality. Minidisc players have better digital-to-analog conversion and better headphone outputs than ANY portable CD player or MP3 player, bar none. Using ATRAC Type-R, you get dynamic range and frequency response at least as good as that of CD audio, but with the warm, smooth, humanistic qualities of good vinyl. It's actually a GOOD thing that MD transcodes other digital formats to ATRAC. ATRAC sounds better than MP3, unless you use LP4, the super-long-play ATRAC codec. ATRAC is better than MP3 at the same bitrate because it is more mature and was designed from the start to store high quality audio, not to be a low-bitrate Internet download format, for which MP3 is optimized. It is true that MP3 at 256 Kbps, at least using the LAME encoder, is generally regarded as indistinguishable from CD audio quality. ATRAC Type-R uses a higher average bit rate than that - 292 Kbps! It is, in a word, overkill. You cannot get better sound quality in a portable device. Just remember to throw away the included headphones and get some that sound decent. The included ones are junk, as one might expect from the headphones that come with a $140 MD recorder. If it came with better ones, they'd have to charge more. The N505 has the same DAC and same headphone output as the top-of-the-line model, the N1, so get some good headphones and you won't have a complaint about the sound. Stability. While solid-state players don't, even the best CD players can skip. Minidisc was designed from the ground up not to skip. You'd destroy the MD unit before you could get it to skip. It's that good. The current line of Sony MD players all have the same anti-skip protection, including the N505. It works amazingly well. Durability. MD players are smaller, lighter, and more durable than CD players. MD blanks are smaller, lighter, and more durable than CD blanks. They store just as much music as an MD, twice as much in LP2 mode, four times as much in LP4 mode (though I don't recommend LP4 for critical listening). Even though it's at the bottom of the line, the N505 feels solid. Bottom line: if you can hardly bear to leave your computer because you love your MP3 collection, fine, buy an iPod and carry your collection around with you. But if you love MUSIC and own some CDs or some vinyl, or you'd like to be able to record on the go, don't hesitate to get an MD player. The MZ-N505 is a great unit to get started with Minidisc. If you need a microphone input, get the N707 or the N1 instead. I am thrilled with my N505 and do not regret choosing it or the MD format in the least.
Rating: 
Summary: Cool !
Review: This is pretty cool ! With Mini discs (they are really mini) costing $... each, this beats any Mp3 player on cost. Its size beats any MP3 CD player. Sound is excellent, DOES NOT skip, and it pretty sturdy. Don't have to use OpenMG and get messed up in their copyright protection stuff...I use RealOne and its straight forward... Only downside is the time required for ATRAC conversion. It requires some patience. A winner from Sony. Worth every $.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent price, excellent quality, excellent deal
Review: when i first ordered this MD player, i thought the audio quality would be bad because of all the negative comments i have heard about LP4. However, when i recorded all my music (128kbit) they all sounded perfect. This device is the best thing that has come up to me since i got my new computer. 320 minutes of music on 1 minidisc is an excellent deal. each minidisc is about 2 dollars. I would recommend this MD player to anyone
Rating:
Summary: awsome! with one small exception...
Review: I got the MZ-N505 about a week ago and I love it! The sound quality is on the same level as a CD player and without the size. And aside from what everyone says, the OpenMg Jukebox software is very easy and understandable. The ONE problem is the stupid NET MD SIMPLE BURNER software which is completly useless because you can do the same stuff with the Open MG. The battery life is amazing, my battery is at full life after a week of frequent use. The headphones that are included aren't that good, so I went along and bought the Sony MDRED228LP in-ear headphones. For $20 dollars, they are insane sounding with the MZ-N505!!! Bass that you can feel thru your entire body! No joke. So in conclusion, I recomend this setup to anyone who wants a small portable MD player with great sound that wont empty your savings account.
Rating:
Summary: something you should know before you buy this product
Review: I recently purchased this Sony Met MD walkman and was thrilled when I read that you can fit up to 5 hours of music on one MiniDisc. But unless you're familiar with what LP2 and LP4 mean, you should know that the only way you can fit 5 hours of music on one CD is if you record it in 66kbps, which is pretty bad quality. I dont record in that mode because its hard to enjoy the music when the quality is so bad. If you want your music to sound fairly good, you'll only get about 2 hours and 40 minutes on one minidisc, which is still good, but definitely not as great as 5 hours.
One feature that I love about this product is that you can erase songs off a minidisc after they're recorded, unlike your standard CD-R used to burn regular CDs. The minidiscs are cheap too, I got a 5 pack for about 7 or 8 bucks.
As for the software, its fairly easy to use if you read the instructions. I have a feeling that the people who have reviewed that the software is confusing probably didnt read the stuff about it in the manual first. Overall, this is a great product, and as long as you're fine with around 2 and a half hours per minidisc, I'd definitely reccomend it.
Rating:
Summary: The perfect solution for commuters
Review: I spend an average of 3 hours commuting daily. I was looking for something small that allowed me to listen to music for a long time, with no skips and good quality. First I looked into MP3 solid state players, but I didn't like the limited memory. Then I looked into CD players with MP3 playback capability, but I didn't like to spend time ripping songs out of CDs and then burning them. I'm not into downloading MP3s, all I wanted was a better way to carry along my CDs. I came accross the Sony MiniDisc recorder/player and it was just what I needed: - Great capacity. With the maximum compression (LP4) a single MiniDisc holds 5 CDs. You don't need to carry CDs with you nor bother looking for them and the sound is still CD-quality.
- Great battery life. A single AA lasts for 56 hours.
- Skip protection. It hasn't skipped once.
- Simple to use. The bundled software, Simple Burner, allows you to copy CDs to the MiniDisc via the USB port. You can select the songs you want and group the CDs by album in the MiniDisc so you can jump easily to whatever you want to listen to. It uses temporal files in your hard disk that eventually get erased so it doesn't clutter it.
- Reusability. A MiniDisc can be rewritten over a million times. You can delete or rearrange contents any way you want.
- Price. A MiniDisc costs [relatively little]. The Simple Burner application runs fine in the background, meanwhile I'm doing something else. If you're connected to the Internet you can get the album information (artist and tracks names) for free and it gets written in the MiniDisc itself. It'll display it as is playing it. Whatever the source is, all sound is recorded into the MiniDisc with Sony's propietary format, ATRAC3. The actual transfer to the MiniDisc is real fast, but first the music has to be converted to ATRAC3 and that takes time. For some reason, when a song has been converted beyond 50% the second half goes much faster than the first. When it's done converting the song, it transfers it to the MiniDisc in a matter of seconds. There's another application bundled to organize and copy MP3s into the MiniDisc, OpenMG Jukebox. I didn't try it yet as I'm not into it, but it'll allow you to make up to three copies of the same song. A protection system to avoid piracy. You can also download the free RealOne player and a plug-in to copy music to the MiniDisc directly from it. Didn't try it either. I put it in my pants left pocket, run the headphones wire inside my jacket so it doesn't tangle and enjoy the music as I commute. Some controls have marks on them so you can locate them with your fingers and every time you use them you hear a beep through the headphones. Many times I adjust the volume or select the song without even looking at it. Bottomline, the perfect solution for a commuter. Is also great to work around the house or to exercise. Thanks,
Juan Carlos P.S. I tried recording in a MiniDisc from a cassette player. I had two CDs recorded in a MiniDisc from a 80's Scottish group, "Deacon Blue". I finally found a cassette I had of them with another album. I connected the MiniDisc recorder to a cassette player and recorded the whole thing. The manual says the recorder will add automatically a track mark whenever it finds silence during two seconds at least. In this case the songs were too close for that to work, so I had to add them manually later on, a very easy task which didn't take too long. The recording has to be made at 1x speed, though, as with any external source. Then, with SimpleBurner I named the album and the songs and placed the album in the correct chronological order. I like to see how a band's sound evolves through the years. Rearranging groups is as easy as dragging them up or down as they're displayed in the SimpleBurner window. Is a really fast process, I think they just change the order in which they're played rather than physically moving them around the disk. So another great feature to add: the ability of recording from different sources in a single disk and sort the groups any way one wants.
Rating:
Summary: Software is OK
Review: Although the software occassional locks up on mp3 playback, I am otherwise blown away by the ease & convenience of this gizmo. The alternative, a flash card-based device, is just too darned expensive when you strive for comparable storage capacity. Sounds good, runs good, easy to carry, reasonably affordable, more convenient than CDR. No, I don't work for Sony. Added benefit? The technology is still rare enough that you don't have to worry about people asking you to borrow (ruin) CDs. I haven't tried the highest compression yet, but the LP2 mode is quite good.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice Hardware, [bad] Software
Review: I saw this MD player with a rebate I couldn't refuse so I bought it. The last player I owned was a Rio PMP300 which only held 32 MB of mp3s. However, It was much easier to use. The software the Minidisc comes with [is not good]. It converts every file that you put on the minidisc into 'atrac3' format which eats up valuable hard drive space. This really made me mad.
Now that I let out some steam , I can get on to the good points. Very compact, small, and stylish player. The Sony design team again comes through. It holds 320! minutes of music on only 1 minidisc .... This is the cheapest media you will find for any player seeing as how DVDRs are still very expensive. Player will display the name of the song and it's information right on the LCD Display. The LCD Display is kind of dissapointing however. It gives off a bad glare but it's tolerable considering what I paid. It is not backlit which would have been very nice. That's all I have for now. I'm still in the process of trying to decide wether or not to return this product.
Rating:
Summary: Convinient and good sound quality
Review: I had absolutely NO problem downloading mp3 and cds. Software is easy to use and this MD walkman is very easy to carry around. I don't understand how some people thought Jukebox software is bad or the recorder is not recognized by the computer, but I suggest them reading the instruction manuals first and see how easy it is to use.... Those people complaining about this product probably don't appreciate anything, and they themselves are the source of their own problems and complains.
Rating:
Summary: Sony Scores with Net MD
Review: I had the unit installed and 5 CD's recorded to it in less than 2 hours. I spent more time reading the material than required as the software is very intuitive. I have a large playlist of 'favorites' that are going to end up on MD so that I can play them in the car. I plan to use this little guy for travel and when riding the mower in the summer. Great price and great value.
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