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Need advice on Sony High Speed Net MD? Walkman.

de8212

Diamond Member
Trying to help a friend out with a walkman type portable mp3 player. Here is the link

High Speed Net MD? Walkman® Recorder

Anyone know much about these things? It says it holds 5 Hours Of Music Storage On One 80 Minute Disc (LP4 Mode). So does this mean it has a removable type disk? Doesn't say how many MB's it is. 5 Hours of music sounds OK unless it's talking about really low kbps.


ANy other pros /cons stick out about this item?


de
 
stay far away. lp4 is too low bitrate, good for voice recording, but thats it. lp2 is more reasonable.

as for mp3, it doesn't play mp3. sony limited MD's to cassette level functionality, they record all audio imputs into their own format, recompressing your stuff, very annoying. their software is also annoying.

sony music keeps sony electronics crippled. paranoid about piracy.
 
MD players do have their merits but I do agree with 0roo0roo that Sony Music screws it all up with their proprietary format and software.


🙂atwl
 
Its MiniDisc, not MP3. I have the step down, the 505, and it doesn't do a bad job, considering I paid $30 for it 😛 I personally notice even MP3 compression, so I can audibly notice the sound quality dip to LP2, but it is tolerable. LP4 is terrible IMO. I HATE the OpenMG software. It is slow, as it has to recompress all if the audio, and overall its just a pain in the ass. The device isn't bad though, its got its uses, I like the record feature, I used it to record a DJ set, and it worked remarkably well, as it can compress to LP2 on the fly.
 
imagine if sony had adopted the mp3 format when mp3 first became big. if their md's simply transfered mp3s as pure data onto their minidiscs. its not impossible, they even have md data discs in japan from what i remember. you could fit a decent amount of mp3 onto a cheap little disc, it would have cornered the market. stupid sony.

ah well, its too late now.

 
Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
imagine if sony had adopted the mp3 format when mp3 first became big. if their md's simply transfered mp3s as pure data onto their minidiscs. its not impossible, they even have md data discs in japan from what i remember. you could fit a decent amount of mp3 onto a cheap little disc, it would have cornered the market. stupid sony.

ah well, its too late now.

Thats what I was hoping for. The MD to appear on my file manager just like another drive. Then I could drag & drop my tunes right onto it, but thats not gonna happen. eh ? Even the portable MD machines w/cradles and USB interfaces don't work like that ?

 
MD Players do not "play" mp3s, what happens is that the software converts the music to ATRAC3 format and puts it on the disk which is a magneto optical disk of around 120mb I believe. I use a sony mzn1 which is great for my purposes. I don't need to carry around 1+gb of music with me. But to me the real kicker is that the player itself is tiny, it fits anywhere and great battery life.
 
Thanks for the info everyone. Sounds like he should not consider this one. What else is good out there? He wants it for the gym mostly. LArge storage, good quality mp3 and no skipping? Anythig out there for around 150.00



de
 
Consider how much time you'll be at the gym, and how much music you can listen to in that time. You probably don't need large storage by today's standards (which is over 1 gb). You can store a couple hrs on a MD, and take 2 discs w/ you, they're so damn small.
 
Thanks for the info everyone. Sounds like he should not consider this one. What else is good out there? He wants it for the gym mostly. LArge storage, good quality mp3 and no skipping? Anythig out there for around 150.00
I *swear* I saw a hard drive mp3 player for that much somewhere, maybe in one of the sunday ads this week? I remember thinking that it was a really good deal at the time, but I'm saving money for a WRX, so I can't buy anything that I can't eat 🙂
 
I'd look at the RCA Lyras and stuff... The ones that take compactflash aren't bad. You can get a 256mb compactflash for like $80 now. That's about 4 hours of mp3 music. No moving parts at all means no skipping.

You can get a used Lyra on Ebay for maybe $70-90..
 
brxndxn
That sounds like it would work. I will run a search later (I'm at work now). Another condition is for it to be easy to copy songs to and from. SO something that will show up under My Computer as an external drive liek a digital camera.

BTW he does have a Canon digi cam and I think it takes compact flash so that would be a bonus.


de
 
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