Sony MZ-N505S Net MD Walkman Player/Recorder (Silver)

excellent sound quality using the highest record speed. using LP2 record, i was able to fit 45 songs to one MiniDisc. VERY long battery life. I've had my player since December 2002 & never had any problems. Software for file tansfer is horribly slow. Overall, this is a nice little MiniDisc player & i plan to buy another one when this one dies.

A major shortcoming of this offering is that you cannot convert your existing MDs into mp3 files. I wrongly assumed that since you could place MP3s onto MDs that you could perform the reverse operation, BUT you cannot.

Therefore, my existing MDs cannot be converted to mp3s, which is exceedingly frustrating.

If anyone knows of an offering where this is possible, would you post it here??

In a world now flooded and governed by Apple I Pod's and Dell DJ's this little player could not last very long in a battle it was destined to loose. Almost three years ago I bought a Sony NET MD Walkman, and even then, if I remember correctly, it was already loosing ground to MP3, flash and hard-disk, based players. Nonetheless, to me, this device was all that I needed.

Some of the features that impressed me the most were the very compact and good looking design. Also, the interface was extremely easy to learn and use. Initially, I was not very pleased with the software it included because it was confusing, not to mention it created copies of the songs in the format that could be used by the player, but it stored them deep in Windows where you could not find them. As time went on I became irritated on why my computer free space kept decreasing even when I didn't install any new programs.

Transferring songs to the player became a lot easier once Real included a plug-in for this device on their media player. After that I absolutely started loving this walkman. Yeah, you could not have all your songs in one MD disk, but that was a minor fault. The quality of the sound depended on the quality of your original files; for example the higher the "bit" rate on you MP3's or WAV's the higher the quality on you MD. One time I was able to fit well over 50 songs on one MD, and used to carry about five MD's; therefore, that was all that I needed.

As I mentioned before I have had this walkman for about three years now, and every button works - the silver paint is starting to come off. However, as long as it works there is no reason for me to get anything else. Overall, the Sony NET MD Walkman is an excellent product.

here's the quick and dirty on the sony net md walkman line... they work great and play great and the mini-discs are cool BUT their software absolutely sucks. you CANNOT just transfer mp3 files, you have to convert EVERYTHING to the sony proprietary format first and then transfer the files, and you have to do this all with the sony sonicstage software which is a major pain to use. on top of that the transfer rates are WAAAY slow. stay away unless you really love sony for some reason. had I known that you have to convert everything to ATRAC3 before it would transfer the files I would have never bought this thing.

There are a lot of great reviews of this product, so I'll keep this one short:

Pros:
- Excellent, Super, Outstanding battery life.
- Tiny profile and footprint.
- Software is easy to use.
- CD's compressed with Sony's native encoder sound fantastic.
- 2 years old and still running.

Cons:
- Can only compress music 2:1 before sound quality degrades noticeably.
- MP3's and WMA's converted to the Sony format sound awful.
- Player menu is a little confusing.
- Player will randomly skip in the middle of a track, even if no bumping of the player has occurred in over 10 minutes.

Basically, I bought this a couple years ago because I thought it was an economical way to port around a music library. iPod's were more expensive at the time, but I think if I'd figured out how many minidisc's I'd have to buy to fit onto one of the iPod's of the day, I probably would have gone with the more expensive iPod. I ended up buying an iPod anyway, because I got sick of lugging around a stack of minidiscs. However, if you're sold on the minidisc format, it works really well, and is a steal at the price.