You have to know this about the player!
Written: Apr 18 '05
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Pros: size, looks, weight, incorporated mic, optical cable for fast transfer.
Cons: Can'tsee in dark (NO BACKLIGHT), limited character taging, copyright issues, capacity (70 songs average maximum)
The Bottom Line: If you're looking for some cool player (the looks, and funtionality) buy yourself an ipod
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| bloodsugar's Full Review: Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-N710 Personal MiniDisc Play... |
I'll be extremly short for this review.
I made the huge mistake of buying the product without prior mayor knowledge. I just thought it had good looks and weight, I actually use it when I go out and ride my bike around (roughly, jumps and stuff) and i don't even remember I have it on me. But I have to say the things that anoy me. First, a mini disc isn't more that a little rewritable cd in a box, and the space available on it it's around 120MB. Of course that's small but the trick is on the encoding of the mp3s that you want to record on it.
Second, by re-encoding an mp3 file you inevitably loose quality sound (not in a horrible way, but you can tell if you like great sound). And the encoding options are LP2 and LP4, being LP4 the smallest size of the files (lower quality).
When you bought your minidisc player and you see how many little things has with it (optical cable, stand for recharge, remote control with cable, etc.), you feel really great like a kid in a candystore. Then you install the software (SonicStage) which permits you to send the files through USB to the device. Once in the SonicStage program some tiny little problems start to bother. One of them is the fact that due to copyrights you are only allowed to send the same file to the device three times and that's it, (this is really annoying when you use some discs as floppys, and once you had some songs deleted from the discs sometime soon you want to record them again), now a smart way getting away with yours is uninstalling the whole program and re-install it, which of course is not the idea.
Another annoying issue that I find a huge mistake or miss care by the developers is, and please check this out, characters in the name of each song actually use a lot of space (and not the smae kind of space that the file itself uses), you could think that's not a big deal, wrong. When the maximum (LP4) average amount of songs in a disc is around 70, that means a lot of characters.... this is more of a problem when you have long names in your songs, for example in classical music.
Let me explain the problem. If you fill the disc with all the characters you can use, that doesn't mean you can't keep loading songs (keep reading), actually you can, but the songs that are loaded in the disc from that point on will have no name (0 characters). It is like the disc has an especific memory for only the characters separated from the file itself, that's just weird.
You can of course organize all your songs in the device by folders permiting you to save some small amount of characters, but who wants to be counting characters?
The thing that I like about the minidisc players is that you save the information in extractable discs, which means the memory is never actually full comparing it to the hard drive players. Now, if you can find some light weight hard drive players like i-pod with enough memory it virtually never get full, let's say 60Gb, you will have no reason to buy this device, that is without considering prices, looks, and maybe one or two more things I forgot.
Bottom line, if I were you I wouldn't buy it, unless you're a Sony fan, like I was until now.
Sorry if it wasn't as short as I though it would be.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 260
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Epinions.com ID:
bloodsugar
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Reviews written: 2
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