So what is the thoughts about the sony mini disc players that you can download songs onto from a computer as i find this option attractive.

Anyone got experience of these things on the board

That requires putting music on media to play in the player....

That's SO last century.

I was fooled by those it sounds like a good idea but it's not. Basically I got one of the netmd ones and I have all my cd's on the computer in mp3 format. In order to put the songs on the player you have to run the mp3's through a program that converts them to another format then uploads that song to the player very slowly. Also it only lets upload the songs to the player so many times. I brought mine back to the store and got a riot.

NetMD is pants. The advert with the Aibo dog is cute though and will probably mean it will sell fairly well to less clued-up customers (the kind that think that Sony is a prestige brand).

the kind that think that Sony is a prestige brand

ROFL

In general, I think mini-discs are past it... I love(d) mine when I used to use it, and I still get it out and dust it off for plane trips. If you step back a few years, and remember the days of portable CD players, and then compare them to minidiscs, you'll see why they were so popular in japan and should have caught on in the rest of the world. (Actually, minidisc players may be more popular in europe than the US...)

The discs are in a sleve so they don't get scratched, a tiny player can also record, and an even smaller player can just play,they (basically) don't skip, the batterys last forever, and once the built in one runs out you just attach the AA side module...

I'd still vote for one over a solid state MP3 player, but do yourself a favor and buy an iPod.

Matthew

Don't fall for it. I was suckered into the MS Walkman, it is a pain in the ass to load songs on to it!

This is my experience with MiniDisc from about 2 years ago. Newer units may have improved things, but from what I've heard, they are still a PITA.
You don't "load" songs from the pc to the player. The printing on some of the Sony MiniDisc players that say they "play mp3" are an outright lie. They do not play mp3. The software on the pc may "play" mp3's, but not the unit. Mp3's are converted to the Sony format (ATRAC). While ATRAC is an excellent sounding encoding algorithm, it is crippled. Crippled by adherance to SDMI.
First off, it's a one-way trip. Songs go on, can't directly transfer them back off. But wait, you say. "Other devices have SDMI". Yes, some do. But with SDMI-crippled mp3 players, you can copy a song quickly onto the player. Dump it easily and copy another. With ATRAC, you have to wait for the conversion process.
Which leads to the Second point, ATRAC was originally designed to encode in real-time. That is, as the music plays, it is encoded (remember recording to tape?). Newer versions can encode faster, they might even do the conversion on the pc, then transfer the file, but it is still slower than being able to transfer a music file directly from one device to another.
Three. The music is encoded onto the disc as one continous stream, with start and stop points (track marks) saved in a TOC (Table Of Contents). When recording with Optical Digital input, the unit senses the gaps between songs and notes it in the TOC as track marks... Usually. Sometimes it misses and you have to fix it manually. If recording with an Analog input, you have to go through the whole disc and add track marks manually. Ugh.
Four. Titles. Sure it has titles. If you want to spend the time to add them. In my case by using the little buttons on the recorder. Time consuming, it was. Though I hear some more advanced units have the capability to get titles somehow from the PC.

Sony had a great idea with the MiniDisc, but blew it with the restrictions placed on it. Too bad.

P.S. I gave the MiniDisc along with a CD changer with optical out to my technically unsavvy sister. She likes it for wearing while delivering mail.
I recently gave my niece a 32mb Rio One. With rebate, $80. Plus another $35 for a 128mb card. Simplistic no titles display, like a CD player, but lightweight and can hold quite a bit of music. Simple drag n' drop from Windows Explorer to load songs.