Great Product, ruined by proprietary terrible Software
Written: Feb 13 '03 (Updated Feb 24 '03)
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Pros: Excellent Battery Life Great Sound CHEAP media
Cons: PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE- NO uploading your recordings to PC
The Bottom Line: Do not buy until Sony (or Hackers) fix the software. (READ UPDATE)
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| ito_ttsom's Full Review: Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-N707 Personal MiniDisc Play... |
I am writing this review because this is all the information I would have liked to have had PRIOR to purchasing the Sony NetMD N707.
Pros:
BATTERY LIFE- The battery is lasting me well over 40 hours. One (1) AA cell battery last over 40 hours, and Sony supplies a re-chargable battery and charge with the unit.
Cheap Media- The MD (mini-disks) are about $2.0(US) each, and are completely rewritable; you can erase and rewrite to your hearts delight. This is far cheaper than buying compact flash, or smart media considering each CD is about 185megs. There are some limitations; more on that in the cons section.
Does Not Skip- I use mine to jog and no matter how much I shake, it does not skip.
Light Weight- This thing is so light you forget you are caring it.
Good Sound Quality- You have 3 choices of sound quality for a mini-disk, SP Highest Quality @ 80 Minutes, LP2 Med Quality @ 160 Minutes, and LP4 Low Quality @ 320. LP2 Sounds great and you 2 hours and 40 minutes, which is far longer than I want to jog.
Looks Good- Hey it’s a Sony, what else would you expect.
Cons:
THE SOFTWARE SUCKS!!!- If you are thinking about buying a Sony NetMD and you don’t have a lot of patience and some computer skills, then DON’T DO IT. This is the biggest headache for the whole deal, right here and I feel the need to elaborate…
The Sony NetMD does NOT play MP3s or wav or any other music formats you may be familiar with; it uses proprietary software called OpenMG and only plays files called ATRAC3. Let me make this as clear as I can: They ONLY software that you can use to transfer music to a Sony NetMD is OpenMG!!! There are plug-ins made by Sonic Stage, and Real Networks that will also transfer music, but they are just plug-ins, and they still have all the same copyright restrictions, long transfer time and, they still convert your music to ATRAC3, and are basically OpenMG with another name and sanctioned by SONY.
About the Copy Write Protection- OpenMG will only let you burn 3 copies of any MP3, ATRAC3, Wav, or directly from a CD at a time. It works like this, the program has a “check-in / check-out” manager, and if you try to burn a 4th copy of the same file, it will not let you do it, until you “check-in” one of the first 3 copies you made. So while you can buy as many MDs as you like for $2 each, you can not make more than 3 compilations that contain the same ATRAC3s. If you want to make the 4th copy, you must “check-in” one of the previous 3 recordings.
When I say “check-in” I mean ERASE from the minidisk using the OpenMG software. There is absolutely NO WAY to download anything you record on NetMD. It does not mater if you just record your own voice, there is still no way to upload it to your PC…period! There are no hacks, warrez or any other software that will allow you to use the Sony NetMD without the OpenMG restrictive software…period! So you can forget uploading anything under any circumstances.
The down load speed from your PC to your NetMD is a bit slow; for example I am running a P3-1gig, WinXP pro, 1 Gig of Sdram, and it took me 30 Minutes to convert 2 hours of music from MP3 to ATRAC3, and then down load it to the NetMD. To be fair I ran the same test with 2 hours of music that had already been converted to ATRAC3 and it only took 20 minutes, but that is still slow.
The software does not work right out of the box. You will have to download 2 patches to make it work, and it is NOT user friendly, in the least. Get ready to spend a LOT of time figuring that mess out, and if you don’t have some computer skilz, give up now before you buy.
Headphones- Throw them away, they are junk.
Carrying Case- Throw it away too. You might this that for a $200US NetMD player they would include a decent case to put it in…but NO Sony does not do that.
Controls- Goofy off button, not clear, but I figured it out.
Conclusion:
I have every opportunity to take the Sony NetMD back from where I bought it, for a full refund, but I am going to keep it instead… I am banking that some bright hacker will come out with a hack to get around the Sony OpenMG software, and make the NetMD the hottest little Media player on the market, bar none. However until then it is still a great way to listen to my music while I run and workout, and it really does sound great.
UPDATE!!!
Ok it’s been a few weeks now and I found a hack.. well sort of, its more like an exploit, to get around Sony's CRIPPLEWARE here is the url: http://www.cc.jyu.fi/minidisc/NetMD_faq.html#_q83
I have personally tried it and it works great, but you still can not upload files from your NetMD to your computer, it is still a one way deal.
Is there any way of transferring MP3s to MD without using OpenMG Jukebox?
Dino Inglese, a Minidisc T-Station message board member offers this tip for using Simple Burner to circumvent OpenMG Jukebox (see his humorous original posting). CAVEAT: You will need Nero, and Nero's Imagedrive feature, or something similar that can create a virtual CD disc image and allow you to mount it to your desktop.
Five easy steps to a clean and hassle free MP3->MD download
1- Open Nero, select Audio CD from the presets and drag all the MP3's you want into it. Nero is far less picky about formats and sample rates. I found this method foolproof.
2- Save or 'Burn' your CD to your hard drive (not your burner). Nero will give you a default filename of 'image.nrg'
3- Use Nero's Imagedrive (bundled with Nero) to mount the .nrg (CD-image) you just created. Lets say Drive 'F' for this example.
I am not an expert, but I found these first 3 steps took around 2 minutes or less for a regular size audio CD (i.e. burning and converting about 10 MP3 tracks to an audio CD 'image' on my hard drive). I have a 1GHz/PIII, so that helps with the MP3->PCM conversion times. A faster machine would mean proportionately faster MP3 conversion and image creation.
4- Select your 'virtual F' CD drive in Simple Burner and burn it to Minidisc.
5- When you are done, trash the large .nrg file sitting on your desktop.
If your machine is fairly fast then Simple Burner's CD->ATRAC conversion is done in on-the-fly in RAM with the disk hardly ticking over at all.
Advantages of this Method:
-You are using reliable software.
-Checkin/checkout is avoided.
-Unlike OpenMG, files aren't left all over your hard drive.
-You can delete and re-arrange the downloaded tracks on your MD without having to resort to connecting it back to your PC.
-It is faster and doesn't thrash your hard drive.
BTW!!! My “yes” recommendation is completely conditional on your computer skills…
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 200
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ito_ttsom
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