Today, day after Thanksgiving shopping orgy day, the Sony store in Wrentham (MA near Boston) was selling refurbished MZ-NE410's for $44.95.
I've been looking for a deal on something that could record MDLP because I've got a lot of old radio shows on MP-3 and real time transfers are pretty tedious. I've got an MDLP player -- Victor (Japan) XM-PX601, but my recorders are an MZ-R37 and an MZ-R700 (wherever it is).
OK, so I've been reading about this poor software for a couple years but figured all I want to do is put some MP3's to MD and maybe a couple books on tape. That should be easy enough.
Well, I loaded up the software and used Simple Burner to do a music CD -- OK, well that worked well enough.
Then I finally noticed the '410 doesn't have a line input -- well I guess that's what you get (or don't) for buying the absolute bottom of the line so it was time to try Sonic Stage.
What a disaster! I couldn't make heads nor tails of it. Then when I did, it seemed to do random things! I dragged and dropped tracks onto the recorder and it said they're the wrong format -- but went through the motions of accepting them. I discovered import but still got wrong format messages -- right format, but they were on a CD so read only (I thought that's what import did).
So I copy them to the hard drive, then import them, this time it takes a while but they're not there. Long experience with lots of poor software tells me to restart the program. Then they appeared.
Then I said to check them out. Out of 10 tracks only one checked out -- maybe I have to do them one at a time, I thought. I tried that and eventually figured out that doesn't work either except for that one magic track.
Turns out only certain sampling/bit rates in the MP3's work. With others it just goes through the motions and does nothing. If the program can play it, why can't it figure out how to copy it?
I'll either return it or sell it on ebay if anybody else is dumb enough to buy it.
