Customer Reviews:
 See the Patters August 10, 2005
5 out of 12 found this review helpful
I first got a minidisc player through a friend. He told me there was a couple things wrong with it, but that was cool. I used it untill I ended up losing it. It was probably stolen. No big deal, I still had all the discs and whatnot.
I bought another. The cheapest model. This time around, I was getting really irritated using the worst software in the entire world, Sonic Stage. Sonic Stage is a horrible manager/media player that Sony forces on you to use the majority of it's digital media products. This is one of the worst software I've ever used. It tries to be user friendly and fails but only ends up suceeding in sucking.
Well needless to say that got stolen too so I bought my final minidisc player. By now, I have about 50 minidiscs, and my third player. I used this for the longest. It's nice it fits in your pocket, but makes you look like you have an odd bulge in your pants. Soon though, a screw fell out. No biggie. Then another screw fell out and I couldnt find any replacements for these special screws. Then it stopped burning and the front was falling off.
Then I smashed it on the sidewalk.
I still have 50 minidiscs, but now I have an Ipod which I got off this very website for 150 dollars. Minidisc players are nice for 50$ worth of limited portablity and poor quality compression. Get it if you want it for a couple months, but dont even do that becaue the software will make you do to your player what I did to mine.
 Great Player...But Not For Long June 11, 2005
13 out of 16 found this review helpful
I bought my first Sony Net MD Walkman in 2003 and I was very pleased with the product. I could record so many songs onto a little re-recordable disc and have them organized perfectly on my device, song titles visible to me while I searched. Fantastic sound quality, resistant to falls, easy to get new discs, and only takes a single double A battery at a time. But as time progressed, I had increasing troubles with both the device and the software it came with. I had been using the Net MD Simple Burner to record my tracks onto discs then and it would suddenly just giving up on me while I was trying to make discs. This concerned me, but not as much as when the device actually began frustrating me. When I wanted to navigate the disc, it would do the opposite of what I wanted it to do. It became absolutely intolerable, so I just bought a new Net MD Walkman.
My second Net MD Walkman, same type as last time, worked great for awhile. I hadn't expected this one to go bonkers like the last, but it did. What were the chances of that? Am I simply the most unlucky purchaser of Sony products ever? No, now I see this is not a coincidence. The second time around I was using the SonicStage software and oh my goodness, it is the most terrible software. At first I actually thought it was real slick, but then it decided to only record my songs when it felt like it. Then it began crashing on me, and it just became a total inconvenience. And then there goes my device. Just last month, my second MD Walkman got senile and hasn't been working right since. I press the forward button, it turns up the volume. I try to go back a track, it goes back three tracks. What is up with this thing?
I have nothing against Sony except for this delightful little gadget. It's inexpensive because it's a piece of garbage that eventually gives up after a certain point. These folks who are saying it is a good buy and "I'm glad I didn't give into the Ipod craze" haven't listened to their MD Walkmans often enough to experience this glitch. It's hardly even a glitch; it's an irreversible technology bugger. I hope Sony can do something about this and make a reliable MD player.
Save yourself the trouble and stay away from this product, unless you don't mind constantfrustration and slovenly software. Your first few weeks with your player will be great and then you will want to smash it with a hammer.
Good hardware, terrible software... June 8, 2005
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
I must admit I was very pleased with this product at first. While minidisks themselves do not hold as much data as a flash memory player, or a hard dive based player, the fact you can change discs at any given moment, re-record over the discs, and given the relatively cheap price of the media (roughly 2 dollars for a re-recordable disc), and very respectable sound quality, I thought I had found my solution to avoiding carrying around a bulky MP3 CD player in my pocket all the time.
You might ask why I simply don't I don't shell out for a Nomad or a full scale iPod? I cannot bring myself to spend more than 100 dollars on a player, I rather spend that money on actual CD's, and I do not need to have the need, or see the reason of carryng around 30-40 GB of music at any given time. Could some one explain why that is the cool thing these days?
But for this player itself, I was very pleased with the player itself. It's pretty durable, even with its plastic shell (I've dropped mine a considerable number of times), the battery life is insanely long (except for when burning the music to the discs), and it's small. So what's the problem?
The software. Wow, I've never seen such a cumbersome, sloppy piece of software in my life. I'm pretty good with computers, not a genius, but the MusicMatch software used to put the music on to the player is so horrifically bad, it deserves an award. The phrase "user friendly" does not apply here. It doesn't stop there either, oh no, it only gets worse. Add to this fact the software creates a converted copy of every song you put on the player in its own format onto your hard dive. This isn't such a big deal until you have converted a lot of music and then you'll wonder where all your hard drive space went. The first idea in one's head to fix this problem would be to delete the unwanted songs right? I would if I could, I never found a way to do so, probably because the software so badly designed.
To even make things worse, I can't even put music on my discs anymore, because every time I go to do so, the program crashes on me. I don't even trust the various utilities within the program used to fix it, beacause that requires connecting to Sony, and I simply don't trust them enough rummaging through my entire hard dive (actually I don't like anyone doing that). So now I'm sitting on a hundred dollar paper weight, thanks Sony!
So now I'm looking for a new player since this thing hasn't worked for months, and I'm sick of not having music with me when I go places. Still, a hard lesson learned, and I will steer clear of anything with Sony's name on it other than Playstation, and even those are pieces of junk (the games for it are awesome though). I suggest you do the same.
 Good hardware, bad software! May 26, 2005
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The player itself is a good piece of hardware, but after a while the software refused to work. After loading my computer with SP2 it refused to even start the program. For a better idea of the amount of complaints with this product and other similar sony MD players check out this site:
http://www.petitiononline.com/Sonymd/petition.html
Just get a CD player... May 17, 2005
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I received a MZ-NE410 as a present from my parents a few years ago, and it's really not that good of an MP3 player. I was only able to put 40 songs on one disc, which is the equivalant of 2 CDs. The software is garbage too. Never have I seen such a confusing program. The play/pause/next track/etc. wheel on mine has screwed up for some reason. When I hit Next, it usually stays on the same track, or goes back a track. Your best bet is to either buy a CD player, or go for a better, flash/HDD MP3 player.
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