Sony finally did it! MD players are worth the money now!! Don't buy an MP3 player!!

Cafe Society
21

The box for this unit says that it is USB 2 compatible, which I believe is faster than IEEE 1394 if I remember correctly. Haven’t tried it, cause I don’t have that capability on my system yet. Even with USB1 it only took me about 5 minutes or so to load up the disc once I had all my tracks formatted etc…

Also, 66kbs does NOT sound anything like listening to an AM radio. You have to understand that the tracks are NOT in MP3 format on the disc. They are in a totally different format. MP3 sounds like dogshit once you drop below 128kbps for that matter. If you get down to 64kpbs it sounds like you are listening to your music thru a fan or something. All wispy.

The iPod is a nice unit, don’t get me wrong. It is just not affordable enough to buy just to go to the gym and it does not support windows straight out of the box. Don’t you have to get a special aftermarket program in order to even get it to work with a PC? May be wrong on that though, but I remember reading it somewhere.

22

I think the disk speed is the limiting factor anyway, not transfer speed of the interface. It says 32x speed for writing LP4 mode audio, which is a sneaky way of saying 8x speed. (LP4 is a 4x compression mode) It should take about 10 minutes to fill up an 80-min disk.

By the way, is this disk format (i.e. the format for storing ATRAC3 files on MD disks) an industry standard? I really don’t appreciate Sony imposing propriatory formats on us.

23

Okay, now I have to change my shorts. I’m all wet. I am torn: the MD you describe sounds good, but I want the RIO Riot with the 20 gig hard drive for the same price as the original iPod with the 5 gig hard drive (the 10 gig iPod is $100 more).

24

I’ve had an MD player since about 1996, when I bought it in Japan. Yes, they are amazing. We also each have an MD walkman, too.

They even sell prerecorded MD’s in Japan, but I’ve not seen them in the States. Are they selling now?

25

Thats what I said in one of my other posts. You can still use it as a regular MD recorder if you choose, the compression method is awsome for packing a bunch of albumns on a $2 disc though.

I only own a portable MD player so the format on the discs doesnt matter at all because I will only be playing them on this player.

Hell, isn’t Sony one of the only companies that makes MD players anyway?

I thought about going for one of the HDD MP3 players myself. Once I saw this thing though I decided it just wasn’t worth the extra money. I have bee nusing this thing for about 3 hours a day for the last three days at the gym and it hasnt skipped once, and the battery indicator hasnt gone down one notch yet.

26

Aftermarket is needed, yup; there’s at least one freeware one floating around, and a more official company’s taking its own sweet time preparing a commercial compatibility program by the name of Xplay. And you’d need to add a FireWire card, but those can be had pretty affordably.

The iPod–and similar units–are likely the future of portable music devices. In a few more years, that is–the pricepoint needs to drop by at least half, and a non-clunky cross-platform solution (or similar device that achieves the same) with that lower pricepoint should sell like crack.

In the interim years, though, that player does look pretty sweet.