MattMoly

I just ran out and picked up the MZ-NH600D at a local Target. I had been waiting for this baby to come out for weeks, after I had made up my mind that $200 would be better spent on a PCM playing Hi-MD player than a $250 Apple iPod Mini. Now that I have it, I find myself wishing I had sprung for the latter. The 600 is great in that it's small and has endless capacity (if you can carry the disks). But, where Sony basically lied to my face and the 600 falls short is the fact that with the Sonic Stage 2.0 software you can't record LPCM, the very reason why I wanted Hi-MD. Since the 600 has no recording input, there is no way to circumvent the softwares shortfall. Liers. In addition to this horseshit, I also was pleased to discover that when you transfer a file to the player it, of course, makes the conversion first, but rather than saving the converted file in a temp foler, it appears to save the converted atrac file in a folder you specify, like you want them there for good. This would all be OK if I could simply delete the files at my leisure and re-convert them if I ever needed to transfer the files back to the player, but the Sonic Stage software doesn't simply refresh its library based on what is still left on your HD. Rather, it looks like it keeps its own accounting and difficulties arrose when I went and found the atrac files on my HD and deleted them, since when I tried to convert those mp3 files again, it said it didn't have the permissions or something. What's the deal with that! As far as I am concerned, Sony needs to realize that the Hi-MD player is still miles behind the other options out there. And as such, they need to make the player and it's software as functional and flexible as possible to even have a chance against competitors such as the new iPod Mini and other mp3 players that use the 4GB microdrive that all fall within Hi-MD's price range. Their biggest mistake in this respect: Atrac3plus. They should have devoted the time and resorces spent on developing and marketing Atrac3plus on a standard more functional and marketable, like simple mp3 for instance. I mean, wouldn't it have been even easier for them to build a new MD player that supported the existing .mp3 format. They know encoding a lossy standard from another lossy standard can only lead to bad audio, so why not just use the least shitty recording?! To conclude my rant, does anyone know of better software that exists? If none does, then does anyone know how to remove Atrac3plus files and have the software know it and account for it? Finally, can anyone give a good reason why Sony didn't build the MD players to just play mp3 files? I'd feel better knowing there was some huge limitation.