Great unit but fix the software.
Written: Jan 02 '03
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Pros: Great LITTLE unit, excellent sound and easy to use.
Cons: The software flat out SUCKS.
The Bottom Line: In the end, I gave it 3 stars because the software sucks. 1 Stars for software, 5 for the unit, average = 3
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| mstroadr's Full Review: Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-N707 Personal MiniDisc Play... |
I'll begin by telling the readers that I am a Senior Test Engineer on contract at Hewlett Packard. In particular I am a software test engineer. I've been doing that work for over 4 years. So when I say this software sucks, I mean that I can catagorize it as something that the QA team should have been fired over.
The software that is REQUIRED to work with all Sony Minidisc players is a dog. It's called OpenMG Jukebox which is ironic since it's fairly restrictive in what you as a user can do. Frankly, it looks like an early Alpha release. It actually looks like a senior engineers final project that's been turnned into a cut rate shareware.
The software is slow. The interface is hard to use and is flat out ugly. When you're ripping tracs it causes issues with other windows on your MS based PC. It slows down the entire system as well and I'm running a 1.8GHz Athlon with 512Mb DDR RAM. It's not a monster but it should take such a hit with this software.
The good news? The minidisk player itself is quite good, the sound quality even at the highest compression levels is as good as most MP3 players and the thing runs forever on one battery. And if it doesn't, it's an AA battery. They're cheap. The minidiscs themselves run about $2 per 80 minute disk and hold between 80 minutes and 5 hours of music. (Depends on the encoding you choose.)
For those of you that are wondering, no, this unit does NOT actually play the MP3 format. It uses Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 software. You can download codecs for use with most major media systems so ripping the songs doesn't have to be done with the software. In addition to that, you can not transfer files FROM the player TO your PC. At least not with their software. Apparently that's how Sony wants to make sure we don't rip of Music.
Other complaints I have heard that I will address:
The buttons are too small to be useable: They're small yes. It's a very small unit at 3" x 3 1/4" x 1 1/8" The buttons would HAVE to be small. But if you pay attention to what you're doing they're fine.
The remote doesn't have an LCD screen: I'm sorry, how lazy are you? The thing is less than 3 feet away and is ATTACHED to you (and the remote) by a cord. Get over it and pull it out of your pocket.
The screen is not back lit: It's not. In the dark, this sucks. Sony, for $200 don't you think a back lit LCD would be handy?
This thing comes with a car adapter, fiber input adapters and all sorts of cool little gizmoes. It's biggest draw back is once again: the SOFTWARE. It's pure crap. BUT, as a test engineer I know a little trick that'll get Sony to fix it. Call tech support. Call them, tell them it sucks. Complain complain and complain. This ends up costing Sony a LOT of money. If nothing else, lost income usually gets large corporations attentions.
To sum up: I give the unit itself a big thumbs up. The software gets a huge thumbs down.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 180.00
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Epinions.com ID:
mstroadr
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Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 0 members
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