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-Great sound quality: what is it about Sony music players that make them sound SO GREAT.-Great battery life: 25 hours on one AA battery-Store your music on little discs instead of your hard drive-Minidisc Media is small and durable. I have a Mac, so I have to use my old laptop. About the size of a Gameboy SP. You have to use iTunes to add music on an iPod right.
On the bad side, you must own a PC to use the Sonic software. Nice. A minor inconvenience because once you put your music to the discs, you are done. But look at what it does:-Portable 1 GB discs that are encased in a durable plastic shell. I bought an iPod ($400) that lasted less than a year. First the scroll wheel broke, then the hard drive crashed. Did I mention that you can put 45 hours on one disc.-Very small: you can definitely put this in your shirt pocket. I have an old Minidisc player from 1992 (talk about retro).
Some complain about the software, but look at the alternative. I bought this little Sony Minidisc player as an alternative to the iPod. Done with iPods.This device is now retro - it's at least 5 years behind the times. It and my original discs are still around and sounding great.
The sound is fine. but this newer one is slow to respond, awkward to open, and the control panel is slightly hard to see. I probably would not recommend this item unless you don't care about ease of use. This is the second minidisc player I've owned. My first one (Sony MZ-R30) was exceptional in quality so maybe it isn't fair to compare the two. My main complaint is the slow operating speed and clumsiness of opening it to insert the disc.
And the Hi-MD format is just terrific.I'd love to have a more versatile machine using Hi-MD, that I could easily record things with, move files around under Linux, and use OGGs etc. Well, shop twice buy once I reckon. and everything was great. I've read that some people get 34+ hours of battery usage & I wouldn't doubt it. Because, as a player it's awesome. with. With a mic jack, and some software tweaks, this would be a heck of a machine I could be happy with for years.
Shame. Now that my little experiment's over it's probably heading to Goodwill.Oh, and the folks I ordered it from (ship2you) did an absolutely superb job, thanks, it got to me in 2 days. Yah SonicStage is a pain (though better than I expected from reviews, I guess Sony did improve it) but the Japanese lessons & music I put on the disc sounded absolutely fantastic. I don't know how in the world I missed this when shopping, but this model DOES NOT HAVE A MICROPHONE, NOR ANY WAY TO USE ONE WITH IT. To me that eliminates at least half of the usefulness of such a device, but it's my fault for not finding that out before buying.So why the 4 stars. The interface on the machine is kinda clunky but for stuff like Japanese lessons that won't really matter too much since you won't be fishing around too much.So as just a player, I really like this little booger.
But this machine ain't it. I got a refurbished model for I think around $90(). I'd read a lot about the Hi-MD format so I wanted to check it out in person. The Hi-MD format is everything I'd read, I can't for the life of me fathom why Sony isn't doing more to spread the use of MiniDisc. It's just too limited, and only because of the iron paw of Sony.
The fact that the media is removable makes this device even more attractive. In contrast, you always have your mini-discs.
Since the advent of HI MD minidiscs Sony has made this the only portable way to listen to music. I've had cds corrupt data in as few as 2 years.
Minidiscs last longer than cds. Minidiscs are rewritable a million times according to Sony, and act as a hard disc drive meaning you can delete and rearrange the music or data on the disc.
The 1 gig capacity and atracplus codec are reason enough to use HiMD. If your hardrive player or flash player breaks and it will, or if the battery fails then you can't access any of the music on the player.
Minidiscs have a much longer life span.
It uses the obsolete USB 1.0 so it take 45 min to 1 hr to transfer 1gb music or data. Sonicstage isn't music-sharing friendly. Sound quality is excellent for compress music. Runs on a single AA battery for days. Some people say it's made of cheap plastic. The Pros: It's a thing of beauty. Well may be true priced at $100.00+, but that aside I would have to disagree. The bad.
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