I’m looking at getting This minidisc player. I can get it free with my reward points from my credit card.
Any advice? I want it for exercise, so does it have really have good skip protection? I like the size and the armband capability. I plan on transferring old cassette tapes to mp3 and burning them to the disc.
No, I can’t just get an MP3 player, and I want this one because it’s free. Okay, I want an IPod, but that’s not gonna happen. 
Sony minidisc players do not play mp3. They play atrack 3 or some proprietary sony format. It’s not a big deal. The software that’ll come with it will convert for ya. A mini-disc will hold about 2-3 cd’s depending on the compression iirc. I once read about these 1 gigabyte mini-discs but I have no idea if they ever made it to market. I don’t know about the skip protection, but it should be pretty decent.
That said, get an ipod! Can you use your reward points for partial purchase of the ipod then pay off the rest?
I just checked my reward points(amex) and it’s about half the points of an ipod mini. If your card allows partial payment then 120ish dollars for an ipod mini is a steal!
Atrac is also of a lesser quality than mp3, and the software that converts and transfers the music is crap.
Or maybe sell the NetMD player on ebay? An mp3 player would really be a step up. An iPod mini will set you back $250 or so. Dell Pocket DJs are $200, but not as good.
I have yet to find a way to make my MD player skip: this includes the old one which fell off of my desk (onto a wood floor) a few times.
You might wanna check out http://www.minidisco.com/ for more information on that particular model.
As for myself, I (heart) my MD player. It’s tiny enough to fit into the center dash of my Miata, so I can use my radio transmitter to listen to it while I drive. (I should really get it set up to directly plug in, but that’s not going to happen any time soon.) It’s very sparing on batteries, and very light weight. My earphones weigh more than my MD player (with battery and disc inside).
Sound quality really depends on what format the original file was in from my experience. Going from MP3 (lossy) to ATRAC (also lossy) can degrade the quality very noticably. It’ll be even worse the more compression you use. Your best bet is to rip your MP3s at the highest possible quality then use the least amount of compression for ATRAC, or even better copy directly from CD to the MD to avoid two lossy conversions.
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The minidisk player is still better than a radio or cassette player. I have an Atrac player, I like the fact it can hold all most of my favs. Sony is currently biting the bullet and is supposedly, looking to find a way to make their machines compatible with other mp3 players.
According to the specs on the site, it will play MP3s, but whatever compression, it’s better than carrying two or three cassette tapes while exercising.
Super duper high quality isn’t all that big of a deal because I’m listening to books, not music. I still want to be able to hear, but right now I’m listening to them on a $10 tape player that’s rather heavy (not to mention ugly, and I’m surrounded by college hardbodies with the latest technology, so adding more old and clunky hardware to my already old and clunky body isn’t so appealing) and annoying to carry or put on my belt.
Sony’s minidisk compression is just fine. Pay no attention to the critics. It mostly depends, like any other compression, on the rate of compression. I often record 160 minutes on one MD and get a perfectly acceptable reproduction for on-the-move listening. For speech recordings you can crank that up to 320 minutes and still get acceptable sound.
Just treat with suspicion any additional software that converts tracks between two different compression formats. That always gives you poor results. If your new MD can play MP3s directly, and that’s what you have on computer, then stick with that.
Whether you go with a MD player (disc based) or a MP3 player (RAM based) is a matter of taste. Recording speeds on memory based players are faster, but that only matters if you are transfering from computer. The capicity of a disc may be less than the average memory based player, but there’s no limit on how many discs you can use.
To get a MD to skip you really have to pick it up and shake it vigorously for a number of seconds. Normal jolts it just buffers over as if they didn’t happen.