the sony net MD quandary

running with scissorsrunning with scissors
Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
i'm looking at buying one of the sony net MD players. they look to be a great portable music option (as low as $129 on some models, with roughly 6 hours of digital music on each disk) for those of us that don't want to shell out $300 plus on an ipod. the only problem is will it work with the mac? do i need to use their software to copy music to it from my machine, which is windows only? or can i simply dump music to it an be done?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    paulpaul Posts: 5,278member
    i dont think you can "dump" music... you have to play it and record it through the MD recorded.... so if you have 6 hours of music you want to have, it will take you 6 hours to get it onto MD... and then you have to put in all the names and artists of the songs.... manually.... on the little wand that comes with the MD player...



    not worth the effort... plus you cant sort by anything from the MD you have a playlist and that is your only option when playing (that and shuffle...) <img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[No]" />



    get a used iPod... much better all around
  • Reply 2 of 6
    madmax559madmax559 Posts: 596member
    skip the net md.....

    i walked into a store & asked if i could record

    using a net md & sales guy says sure

    I wanted to record myself on the guitar.

    then i ask if i can output that to a pc for

    processing and....BLEEP..."sorry sir it wont

    let you do that in case you steal music"



    duh~~.......they lost my business right there

    & then...



    whats the point of having recording on net md

    eg lectures etc etc if you cant play them anywhere

    else or save them......



    stick with the ipod...doesnt record but doesnt

    shove drm down your throat either.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    1) I do have the distinct impression that you can only use the net MD with Sony's software that will only run on PC (but VPC might help in that case).



    2) I do not agree with Paul. The new net MD's offer 'fast transfer' meaning: they use the entire bandwidth of the USB (up to five mbit/s, is it?). This in contrast to earlier models, where the USB served only as real-time bridge.



    3) Another option you could consider, MadMax, the ARCHOS jukebox (as I guess they are called). Up to 20 GB HD mp3 player AND RECORDER.



    The only downside I have noticed so far: USB only (so quite slow if you want to put 20 GB on there, but then again: you don't need to do that every day).



    If you should decide to buy one, I would definitely like to know how they are.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    USB1.1's maximum bandwidth is 12 Mbit/s, or 1.5MB per second. About the same speed as slow ethernet or Airport. FireWire, on the other hand, is 400Mbit/s, or around 50MB per second. Much faster. And there's USB2, which has a maximum bandwidth of 480Mbit/s, but the sustained transfer rate is only about 200Mbit/s. However, USB2 can be used (at slower speed, of course) on a USB1.1 equipped computer.



    It can get confusing because some buses (i.e. SCSI) measure their throughput in MB (megabytes) per second (Ultra160, Ultra320 have 160MB and 320MB per second, respectively), whereas others (like USB, FireWire, and Ethernet) measure it in Mbit (Megabits) per second. There are 8 bits to a byte, so there are 8 megabits to a megabyte.



    I'd be concerned about a hard drive based MP3 player that uses only USB1.1, because you'd have to spend so much time transferring the music that you will spin the hard drive for a lot longer, causing a shorter life. USB1.1 works fine for those little Rio players that take compact flash cards, because their capacity is only 32-128MB usually.



    Incidentally, I talked to someone in my Calc class today who has an MD player. He really likes it. He tells me that the player itself can get MP3s from his computer and then burn them at 32x speed onto his little rewriteable discs, which can store up to 5 hours of music (depending on the bitrate; he says there's no real difference between the highest quality and the medium setting, though he's not tried the lowest one yet).



    Okay, so this post wasn't too well-written... but I hope you got something useful from it!
  • Reply 5 of 6
    running with scissorsrunning with scissors Posts: 1,124member
    thanks for all the skinny, guys. will keep you posted if i decide to go the MD route. did find out that there is a open source project that is in the early stage of development to create a cross platform software equivilent to sony's. sounds promising.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    nguyenhm16nguyenhm16 Posts: 203member
    One huge downside w/ MD (besides all that DRM, and it's related) is that all audio is stored on the MD as ATRAC last time I checked. Therefore, you have to transcode MP3 to ATRAC. You do lose some quality (like making an MP3 from an MP3). Also one of the reasons you have to use the Sony software, I think. It's more Sony trying to shove their proprietary standards down your throat (like memory stick).
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