Sony Portable Mini-Disc Player/Recorder

Minidisc players are great for several reasons. The player is microscopically small (and just plain cute!). Minidiscs are removable (like a cassette or a CD), so you can fill up dozens and dozens of discs with different recordings. (This is why I use minidisc and not MP3. I need to have no less than 12 hours of music on my person at any time. With a portable MP3 player, this is just not practical. With a minidisc player, its a walk in the park.) Minidisc players handle the shuffle feature far better than CD players ever will - there's never any pause or noise between tracks. Recording is ridiculously easy; all that is required is a headphone jack. You can hook your minidisc player into any stereo, walkmen, amp, casio keyboard, television set, or whatever and record music in real-time (i.e., if the song is three minutes long, it takes three minutes to record it). This is great for recording on the go - like say you're at your friend's house and you hear a new song you just love, you can plug your minidisc player in and record it right then and there. Hooking up to computers is also quite easy, but recording from your friend's computer isn't a seamless or quick process (this device is pretty monogamous when it comes to computers). Minidiscs can be recorded over again and again, and you don't have to record or erase everything at once. You can record and delete tracks one-at-a-time. This is not like your CD Burner; it works more like a really advanced cassette deck. On the downside, minidisc players have moving parts, and therefore may skip if bumped or jostled (whereas an MP3 player you can throw in a washing machine without it skipping).

My first and foremost complaint about this specific unit is that it doesn't get very loud. I don't know whether this is a side-effect of the recording process, or is a limitation of its output. What I do know is that if you walk through a high-traffic neighborhood, or board a bus, you may have to strain to hear the music even with the volume turned all the way up. Quite a problem, but one I've more or less adapted to. To be fair, a lot of this has to do with the recording quality I select. You can record in Stereo, Mono, LP2, or LP4. At LP4 you can cram nearly FIVE HOURS of music on one little disc. Very cool! I most often record in LP4. But I compromise my sound quality by doing so. If you record in Stereo, or even at LP2 (you still get 74 or 148 minutes of music, respectively), your sound quality improves substantially. Another way to combat the quiet volume is to set the "RecVol" manually, rather than automatically (ALWAYS do this!). HOWEVER, you'll still struggle with the weak volume, though it won't be nearly as bad.

As far as other features go, labeling tracks must be done by hand, and is no more difficult than storing numbers in your cell phone. Manual track editing isn't tough at all. Moving tracks (you can change a song's position in the mix) is super-easy. And everything is done on the player itself, so you can tool around with your music on the go.

The final issue is whether or not a minidisc player is worth the money. Of course, that all depends on what you want to do with it. Is it good for a work-out? Absolutely not. Is it a good replacement for a CD player? Not if most of your music is on CD. (Remember, a minidisc isn't really an improvement on CD. Although the player and disc is smaller, the sound quality is inferior.) Is it useful for recording your garage band? I think so. Is it useful for home electronic recordings? Absolutely. Is it a good way to store MP3s? Sure! Could you use it to record environmental sounds, or even to record interview conversation? With a good microphone (which is not included), you certainly could. Myself, I find it most useful for recording tracks from my swollen vinyl collection, so that I can listen to my records away from home. And for that purpose, there's no better personal audio device than a minidisc player. I kinda bought this on a whim (basically I wanted a new toy), and I've been really very happy with it. But if I didn't have so many albums on vinyl, I'm not so sure how much I'd use this device.

The player is about the size of a deck of cards. One minidisc can hold 1-4X the music of a CD, depending on which recording setting you use. The battery life is really good, better then most CD players. The added hookup allows you to record off of most anything. Plug it in the headphone jack of any device or connect it to your USB port on your computer. The computer connection acts like an audio output device (a.k.a. a speaker), it doesn't matter what format the music is in. The minidiscs run about $[money] a peice. I've used it at the gym for over 2 mths now. I've dropped it twice and it's held up. It's nearly impossible to make it skip.

The only drawbacks that I found are that it is real-time recording, to record 80-min of music, you have to play 80-min of music. Battery life is less during recording mode (it only requires 1 AA battery, though). Labeling the songs is time-consuming, but that's not a big priority for me and I don't do it anyways. I wish it had a belt clip, I've been sticking it in my pocket at the gym. One final thing is that most people in my area has never heard of minidisc. I found this player at one store, but they didn't have the mindiscs. I found the minidiscs on clearance at another store. I have to drive 50 miles to get more discs and other accessories or order them from online.

Overall, this product is definitely what I was looking for. I can take my music almost anywhere. Everybody knows what an MP3 player is, but if you compare the two, minidisc blows them out of the water!! The storage media is cheaper and holds more music. The battery life is allot better. I can record from different formats. It's small and durable. I am happy with this product.

The main reason for 3 stars is the durability. I dropped my recorder once, and the machine opened, and the Minidisc flew out. The latch to close it also bent, in addition to the door coming partway off, and I had to repair that in order to get the unit to close and functino properly again. This is odd, as I had heard from others that this was a durable unit, and usually Sony products can withstand a beating.

Currently, I am residing in Japan, where I just purchased the SONY-MZR909. It has yet to make it to the American market, but keep your eyes out. It's got many new features that the 500 lacked. Mainly, it has a powered mic jack. It also supports MDLP, and has a group mode, so you can split up the tracks if you only want to listen to a few. It has a new system called personal disc memory, where it stores your sound settings on each disc, and retreives them each time you change discs.

This is a good first recorder, but if you can afford it, go with a higher line product.