psych

in the uk (well technically...) www.pixmania.com have by far the best price for the MZ-H1... £190! http://www.pixmania.com/uk/uk/45240/art/so...yer_mz_nh1.html not in stock till 31/05/2004 though, but from what i unerstand, that seems to be the case with pretty much everyone. best of all if you live in london, you can go to their pickup store, next day, and extended hours, to collect your goods unfortunately, they don't seem to be stocking any of the other products in the range... maybe a few emails could persuade them?

although the c.labs are technically decent, and actually have a user replaceable battery, they are meant to have one of the worst menu/navigational systems yet. no quality claims can overcome this. as for the cowon players, they do have a hdd based model out now, the m3. which seems to have taken its inspiration from a md. a superthin sleek silver body, with a remote providing all the controls sadly, batterylife is nowhere near md standards, otherwise this might have been a nice alternative.

well then, assuming this is correct, this would also work the other way... hi-md would make a perfect backup for digital camera's. you know how tons of c.labs muvo's have been cannibalised for their cflash storage? imagine being able to use a £5 1Gb backup cartridge in the hard wearing form factor of the hi-md? also whilst i suppose the possibilty that data could be offloaded from the hi-md to a hdd without a pc is nice, the real seelling point would be if it could convert audio data from a hdd to atrac3 on the hi-md. yes it could be done in realtime, but you'd be there for quite a while actually the above would only work with a dap, since i dont think any poratble hdd supports playing data from them, since they'sd need a battery, processor, etc... back to te drawing board.

sorry, hdd = hard disk drive. i don't really mean the music players, but actual portable hard disk drives used for storage. eg. http://www.freecom.com/ecProduct_detail.as...=FHD%2DXS+20+GB i know the new iriver supports "usb on the go" which means you could plug a usb camera etc in, and it would download the data to the dap's hard drive, and free up your camera. ie use it as a truly portable storage device, with no pc needed to facilitate things. i suppose i just want the best of both worlds, a hi-md for music, and a hdd to store music on without the need for a pc to act as a go-between.

sigh.. that'll teach me for not reading thorugh the question sticky first technically, a downloader would be great for me. i backup most of my stuff to the pc as VBR mp3s, more for ease of use than anything. however then i saw the prices. the mzh3d is japan only and would cost more than any of the others to import to the uk and then i found that i could get a mzh1 for £190 (~$300) i only hope the mzh900 will be discounted as much, since that looks to be my machine of choice now. specially with the battery options seeming to be lacking on the nh1. thanks for the help.

i must be missing something here. do all hi-md machines have a usb input? if so could a player download tracks onto itself? and therefore, the only difference between it and a real recorder, is that the recorder can do external recordings? or is it only possible to use the usb in this fashion for downloading data, and having the machine act as a usb mass storage device? if the former is the case, then i'd have no real need for a recorder (unles si needed ot do real recording). i could use the pc to rip cd's, and then transfer them to a player via usb?

would it be possible to transfer auidio/data from a usb hdd without the need for a software intermediary, or am i just dreaming? if it could, which i very much doubt, then there'd be no need for a hdd based dap...