Need a player to replace ipod

[aggie08]

Well I've grown tired of my Ipod, everyone's got one and the battery doesn't last very long any more. I own a Sony MZ-R37 from a while back and I love the smallness, quality, and uniqueness of it. I did a lot of research when I bought my current player but I seem to have missed quite a bit in the meantime. I'm basically looking for a functional replacement of the Ipod; that is, transfers music from my computer quickly and is able to put lots of songs on one disc. My current player transfers music at cassette speed (just records as you pipe music into it) and with 1500 songs that would take an awful lot of recording and editing track names. Do these new ones transfer music like a digital player? Do they keep the track names as they transfer over? How many songs can the new fancy discs hold? Anything else I should know?

Thanks, I know it's alot of questions

Matt

[A440]

Yes, minidisc is now in the digital player era. All units beginning MZ-N, MZ-NH and MZ-RH use the program SonicStage--Sony's answer to iTunes, sort of--to make a library and transfer music. There's also a second program, Simple Burner, for transfer of CDs to minidisc: it checks track names (with CDDB) and then transfers to MD.

MZ-NH and MZ-RH are Hi-MD units. They use a 1 GB disc, although they will also play all of your older discs. Your R37, and all the MD units before the Hi-MD, used 74-minute or 80-minute discs. By the time the MZ-N** units came along, Sony had figured out a way to multiply the time on the old discs by 2 (LP2) or 4 (LP4), until an 80-minute disc could hold 320 minutes of low-quality sound. The 1GB discs will hold 90 minutes of CD-quality recording, 7 hours and 55 minutes of very good compressed recording (Hi-SP) or nearly 32 hours of passable recording (Hi-LP). An 80-minute disc holds slightly less than 1/3 as much.

The lowest-priced Hi-MD unit is the NH600D, made in 2004--essentially an Ipod-like player that downloads (that's the D) music from your computer. On Ebay, you could probably find one for under $100. The fanciest is the new MZ-RH1, which is really geared for portable recording but also has excellent playback.

However, if all you want is a player, minidisc is pretty big and bulky these days. I love MD for recording, but for a personal music player, I use an iRiver T30, the red one, which holds 1GB and can do straight drag-and-drop of music files. That is, instead of transferring through SonicStage, it works like a USB drive and you can just drag a folder of mp3s onto it--or use iTunes to "import" a CD onto it directly. The Creative Zen Nano Plus is also 1GB with similar features, though I haven't tried one. Both are under $70.

Edited October 31, 2006 by A440

[aggie08]

Yes, minidisc is now in the digital player era. All units beginning MZ-N, MZ-NH and MZ-RH use the program SonicStage--Sony's answer to iTunes, sort of--to make a library and transfer music. There's also a second program, Simple Burner, for transfer of CDs to minidisc: it checks track names (with CDDB) and then transfers to MD.

MZ-NH and MZ-RH are Hi-MD units. They use a 1 GB disc, although they will also play all of your older discs. Your R37, and all the MD units before the Hi-MD, used 74-minute or 80-minute discs. By the time the MZ-N** units came along, Sony had figured out a way to multiply the time on the old discs by 2 (LP2) or 4 (LP4), until an 80-minute disc could hold 320 minutes of low-quality sound. The 1GB discs will hold 90 minutes of CD-quality recording, 7 hours and 55 minutes of very good compressed recording (Hi-SP) or nearly 32 hours of passable recording (Hi-LP). An 80-minute disc holds slightly less than 1/3 as much.

The lowest-priced Hi-MD unit is the NH600D, made in 2004--essentially an Ipod-like player that downloads (that's the D) music from your computer. On Ebay, you could probably find one for under $100. The fanciest is the new MZ-RH1, which is really geared for portable recording but also has excellent playback.

However, if all you want is a player, minidisc is pretty big and bulky these days. I love MD for recording, but for a personal music player, I use an iRiver T30, the red one, which holds 1GB and can do straight drag-and-drop of music files. That is, instead of transferring through SonicStage, it works like a USB drive and you can just drag a folder of mp3s onto it--or use iTunes to "import" a CD onto it directly. The Creative Zen Nano Plus is also 1GB with similar features, though I haven't tried one. Both are under $70.

Thanks for the reply. I might just settle for MD regardless, because they're really cool.