Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony MZ-N505S Net MD Walkman Player/Recorder (Silver)

The unit actually does run 50 or 60 hours on a measly AA battery. Using a NIMH battery, it runs longer. Taking the battery out of the unit makes the unit feel almost weightless. Unit is smaller than a standard man's wallet. Place it into a ziplock bag for protection. Software has complicated interface but it is not insurmountable; there is a learning curve; it could have been optimized better for friendliness. Biggest problem is when file transfer lock ups occur due to incompatible bandwidths of source media, but such error may not be immediately recognized because the software does not throw an error message. MP3 conversion is not difficult. CD conversion is not difficult but eats up disc space on host computer; solve this by finding "storage" files and deleting them. Using a third party music conversion program may be useful to generate lots and lots of WAVs repetitively if that is what you want to do. Sound is excellent in full stereo recording mode; it is acceptable in LP4 compression mode; compatible with MP3. Holds about 1.5 CDs per minidisc at full stereo mode, and about 5 to 6 CDs at LP4 mode. Unit does not skip with lots of jostling around. Can't figure out how to record in the usual manner because all my hardware is non-optical. Better than MP3 in my opinion because you can pop the data disc OUT. This unit/system is not well suited to the technologically challenged; proper use of it is demanding. Can't believe its this [price]; must be threat of MP3 players. USB in, optical ins and outs, headphone, pseudo-holographic colored display, weird plug in thingey next to headphone jack, more supporting documentation than I've seen in a long while. Turns your notebook computer into a recording studio. Don't know how they crammed this much technology into something this small. Much much sexier and more intriguing than MP3ers.

Pros:
1) Amazing battery life
2) Great sound in SP, LP2 modes
3) Good sound (and 5h20m recording) in LP4 mode
4) Will not skip.
5) For fast CD to MD ripping via USB, Simple Burner software is quick and easy.
6) Flexible editing features (change track order, erase tracks, rename, combine, and delete tracks.)
7) very small and lightweight
8) Inexpensive, re-recordable media

Cons:
1) OpenMG software is restrictive (check-in, check-out) and slow. It has to convert all file types (wma, mp3, etc.) to ATRAC, and leaves copies of these converted files on your computer.
2) No upload capability. A bummer for live music and field recordings in particular.
3) No true SP support (Simple Burner has no SP or SP-mono option at all, and OpenMG software converts all files to LP first, so you don't get true SP quality.) The only way you can record in true SP is real-time.
4) No microphone input and no remote for the headphones. No big deal -- if you need these features, buy the MZ-N707. You can also upgrade to remote headphones at www.minidisco.com.

Overall, I really like this player. I'm thrilled with the fact that I was able to fit the entire 4-CD studio recordings of The Police on one minidisc. It's flexible, easy to use and sounds great. If you are heavy into mp3s downloaded files, this may not be the most flexible solution, but it works. If you're like me and you just want a portable means of carrying music from your CD collection around, Net MD is perfect.

Sony could make this into a home run by
a) giving full SP and SP-mono support to Simple Burner and OpenMG
b) allowing for uploading (at the very least, for non-copyrighted material).
c) speeding up OpenMG file conversion.

The ideal portable digital player would have the following properties: 1. can easily fit into your pocket, 2. have generous and inexpensive storage capacity, 3. be rewritable, 4. allow movement of material back and forth from the computer to the player, 5. have a microphone for recording, 6. have excellent battery life, 7. play all kinds of media files.
I have been a mini disc user for many years. Prior to the MP3 era this was unquestionably the best portable format. Unfortunately it has, to date been stymied by low storage capacity per disc, slow recording times and file incompatibility.
This new mini disc walkman is fantastic value for money...As a mini disc player, it records with the superior atrac R format, and as recording can also be done from the CDROM of your computer, the CD database can be accessed, and the names of the songs downloaded (no more fiddley track naming). Interestingly, this does not access the built in CD database in the windows operating system, by which programs such as Musicmatch "remember" CDs. The sound quality at standard recording is excellent, at LP2 it is marginally worse than 128kbs MP3 and at LP4 there is considerable quality dropoff, which is often unnoticable when walking around with the player. LP4 allows you to record up to 5 CDs to one $2 minidisc.
So far so good. The software is rather tempermental. Although advertised as a "NetMD", MP3 files have to be first converted to Atrac 3 before they can be imported into the player. This is painfully slow. The conversion program is OpenMG jukebox. This program recurrently crashes on me when I try to convert MP3s. I have given up with this process and use my MP3CD player. Furthermore, the net burner software is not great either. It grinded to a halt, in the midst of recording at LP4, several times. Overall, as a media converter, this is not great, and I would recommend this more for re-recording your own CDs than MP3s downloaded from the internet.
The slower play function is a major advance for minidisc. One of the great things about this format is that you can record virtually anything. For example, last week I plugged mine into the audio out plug of my TV and recorded a concert at LP2 (150 minutes). You can subsequently insert track tags, and delete the ads (the tracks then squish together without a gap).
It is a pity that this walkman does not have a microphone socket...Being able to record for 5 hours on a single disk through a microphone and upload the recording to your PC would make this the ultimate voice recording device.
The battery life on this unit is awesome. I have used my MD walkman daily for the past 3 weeks on a single AA battery.
I would strongly recommend obtaining the wonderful fontopia ear bud headphones to add to this device...
This is an exceptionally good product, let down by mediocre software, and Sony's obsessional attitude to digital rights management (why can't I make as many copies of my own personal recordings as I want?). 5 out of 7 criteria ain't bad

I spend an average of 3 hours commuting daily. I was looking for something small that allowed me to listen to music for a long time, with no skips and good quality. First I looked into MP3 solid state players, but I didn't like the limited memory. Then I looked into CD players with MP3 playback capability, but I didn't like to spend time ripping songs out of CDs and then burning them. I'm not into downloading MP3s, all I wanted was a better way to carry along my CDs. I came accross the Sony MiniDisc recorder/player and it was just what I needed:

- Great capacity. With the maximum compression (LP4) a single MiniDisc holds 5 CDs. You don't need to carry CDs with you nor bother looking for them and the sound is still CD-quality.
- Great battery life. A single AA lasts for 56 hours.
- Skip protection. It hasn't skipped once.
- Simple to use. The bundled software, Simple Burner, allows you to copy CDs to the MiniDisc via the USB port. You can select the songs you want and group the CDs by album in the MiniDisc so you can jump easily to whatever you want to listen to. It uses temporal files in your hard disk that eventually get erased so it doesn't clutter it.
- Reusability. A MiniDisc can be rewritten over a million times. You can delete or rearrange contents any way you want.
- Price. A MiniDisc costs [relatively little].

The Simple Burner application runs fine in the background, meanwhile I'm doing something else. If you're connected to the Internet you can get the album information (artist and tracks names) for free and it gets written in the MiniDisc itself. It'll display it as is playing it. Whatever the source is, all sound is recorded into the MiniDisc with Sony's propietary format, ATRAC3. The actual transfer to the MiniDisc is real fast, but first the music has to be converted to ATRAC3 and that takes time. For some reason, when a song has been converted beyond 50% the second half goes much faster than the first. When it's done converting the song, it transfers it to the MiniDisc in a matter of seconds.

There's another application bundled to organize and copy MP3s into the MiniDisc, OpenMG Jukebox. I didn't try it yet as I'm not into it, but it'll allow you to make up to three copies of the same song. A protection system to avoid piracy.

You can also download the free RealOne player and a plug-in to copy music to the MiniDisc directly from it. Didn't try it either.

I put it in my pants left pocket, run the headphones wire inside my jacket so it doesn't tangle and enjoy the music as I commute. Some controls have marks on them so you can locate them with your fingers and every time you use them you hear a beep through the headphones. Many times I adjust the volume or select the song without even looking at it.

Bottomline, the perfect solution for a commuter. Is also great to work around the house or to exercise.

Thanks,
Juan Carlos

P.S. I tried recording in a MiniDisc from a cassette player. I had two CDs recorded in a MiniDisc from a 80's Scottish group, "Deacon Blue". I finally found a cassette I had of them with another album. I connected the MiniDisc recorder to a cassette player and recorded the whole thing. The manual says the recorder will add automatically a track mark whenever it finds silence during two seconds at least. In this case the songs were too close for that to work, so I had to add them manually later on, a very easy task which didn't take too long. The recording has to be made at 1x speed, though, as with any external source. Then, with SimpleBurner I named the album and the songs and placed the album in the correct chronological order. I like to see how a band's sound evolves through the years. Rearranging groups is as easy as dragging them up or down as they're displayed in the SimpleBurner window. Is a really fast process, I think they just change the order in which they're played rather than physically moving them around the disk. So another great feature to add: the ability of recording from different sources in a single disk and sort the groups any way one wants.

An optical minidisk player/recorder is the perfect mp3 vehicle: records in high quality (CD) or compressed (mp3), converting any source to its own format during download. Its replacable media is a true optical disk... almost as small as any memory cartridge, and competes with mp3-player expansion memory at the ridiculously low price of [money] for up to 80 minutes of music. Each minidisc is rewriteable forever. Now that Sony has perfected the USB interface and Long Play Mode, there's no reason to buy an iPod for nearly 3x the cost (buy two of these and 50 discs instead). This model, in particular, is a bargain. Light, rugged, with immaculate sound. Comes with headphones, battery, USB cable, PC software (no MAC available), and one disc.