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

well for the pros- it doesnt skip EVER, the minidiscs are extreemy cheap for what and how much they hold, it is small, light, and tough(dropped it many times and ran it into a wall) the sound is pretty good, can barely tell that it is less than cd quality. convienient, it transfers songs very quickly and if the recording fails (rarely) you can still have the previous songs on it. Cons- no light on the lcd, sometimes the open md jukebox gets corrupt, with it had an aluminum casing just incase it does get smashed somehow. wrapparound headphones, more volume, and the paint eventually comes off of the corners. otherwise its an awesome music player thing. i bought a mp3 player and it doesnt even comeclose to matching my minidisc player, it also sometimes cuts a song in half but to fix it just make it so u cant record back over it.

I bought this pathitic box for quite some money, only to find out within hours that the software took about 30 min. to install on a Pentium 4 with 4 gigs of ram. Not only did the software installation go badly, the actual transfer of songs was long and unreliable. It takes about half an hour to transfter to cd JUST ONTO THE HARD DRIVE. You must transer it using the software due to it uses some weird formatte. Then burning the songs took another ten minutes. When you did get them on, youll find that after an hour, the song data gets mixed with each other, and the tracks start 10 seconds into the previous song. Out of all the music devices ive used, this is by far the worst one ever. I do not reconment buying this excuse.

Let me start off by saying that this in general is a very good minidisc player. With that aside i would like to say that everything else is far from being simple to use. When you get ready to use this product you'll notice that you will need to use their software in order to transfer the MP3s to your MD player.

it begins. . .

The installation of OpenMG is one of the longest i have every seen. Took me at least 4-6 mins to get it fully installed. Now There are two separate programs, OpenMG and Simple Burner.
OpenMG is the program that is used to transfer the MP3s over to the MD player. Simple Burner mearly rips and transfers the newly made MP3s to you MD player.

Sounds good right? . . .Wrong

OpenMG leaves traces of the song on your HD, so basically its filling your HD up with duplicates of your song but in their format (ATRAC). Then they put a restriction on it which only allows 3 transfers of one song (called checking out) and after that you will have to delete the song by using this software (called checking in) in order to be allowed more transfers.

Simple Burner only allows you to rip the songs to LP2 or LP4 (basically compresses it to fit more songs) but there is no option to rip it in STEREO (i need this in order for it to work on my old MD player which does not support LP.

There are ways around it though, you can download REALONE PLAYER GOLD and then add a device section to download a patch for NET MD SUPPORT. It then becomes basically OpenMG but without leaving any copies in ya HD. It is easy to manage songs on your Minidisc as well.

With that being said, Yes this player is the best for its price, but be ready to be disappointed by its software that is used to transfer your songs.

This is a great product, i can store my music on the mds so i can take the mp3s off my pc, which is awesome. I can fit 3-5 Lps on a single disc at 132 KBS, awesome. I can transfer an entire cd in less than 5 minutes, awesome...
PROBLEM- transferring an entire disc worth of MP3s takes 40 minutes unless the files are already in ATRAC3 with USB 1.0. That really [bad], but its worth it, becaus eoppin in a new disc is so much better than rewriting a memory card. One thing that is really great about the minidisc, its aweosme for running and jogging, not as small as an mp3 player, but still great. Wish it was backlit though.

I love the MD player just wish that Music jukebox supported it as well as the sonic stage. I think the controls on the sonic stage program are hard to understand. and some of my MP3 files are not compatable with the atrc3 system.