Sony MZ-R700DPC MiniDisc Walkman with Stick Style Remote
Excellent Hardware Unmatchable Horrible Software Nightmare
Sony has the final word in audio at this point in time.  I have 5 hours 20 min of audio (actually prayers) on my minidisk player right now.  It has changed my life.  I purchased a very high quality neoprene belt holder from Best Buy for the unit and it works perfectly -I wear it all day and no one notices.<BR>     Battery time is phenomenal.  I use rechargeable batteries and replace the SINGLE double A battery only once every three days.  Praise God!  A CD portable player would suck batteries in half a day (I've had four or five).  Also, doing your prayers is not an easy activity, and when you have to switch a CD or replace a battery, that's usually where you leave off and go do something else.<BR>      The software DOES NOT WORK.  It works if you do not care what order you put your tracks in.  For example, I drag and drop a track onto my playlist and sometimes it puts it at the bottom but most of the time it puts it on top.  That means you have to drag your favorite song on last.  So put worst to best.  But that wont work because a small portion will drag and drop anywhere sometimes last.  <BR>      The worst part is when you move the tracks.  You'd think you could just drag a track to the position you want -especially since a black line appears showing where it would land -but no, it often times yanks back to where it was, but strangely one space above where it was.  So if a track is twenty tracks down and you drag it up you will find it rebounds back to 19 tracks down, then 18, then 17 etc.  Now, when you do finally get the track in the right place everything above it is fine, but below it changes.  So if 36 tracks are fine except the 34th track needs to be in the 7th place, everything from 1-7 will be fine, but everything after 7 will get juggled around -its insane -I have spent hours trying to get playlists right -its absolutely crazy!!!<BR>     My fix was to create a new folder in my Sound Forge program folder (Sound Forge is a piece of software that came withmy Sound Blaster sound card that records music from various sources and allows you to cut and paste etc. within a piece of music).  I copy my music files and then paste them into my new folder -lets say \\"playlist 1\\" thus I leave the original music in tact and have a manipulateable copy which I can rename with a number in front of.  So in my \\"playlist 1\\" folder I rename each track with 1-9 in the order I want.  Then I make a second folder called \\"playlist 2\\" for tracks 10-99 because windows alphabetizes by first letter and puts #10 after #1.<BR>      Now, DO NOT FORGET that you will never be able to change the format you put a track into unless you change its name.  I accidently recorded once in LP2 instead of LP4 and my CD was only half as long.  I even uninstalled all sony programs off my hard drive and scoured all my folders and when I reinstalled the tracks still came up \\"optimized in LP2\\"  So I was getting CDs with LP2s and LP4s on them.  My above playlist folder fix ends the problem.<BR>     The software loads automatically without any choices before during or after -it just loads and askes you to agree to contracts about 10 or 11 times -who knows what all the software it loads are?  I have found one horrible thing thus far.  I found it because Norton Internet Security claimed it was trying to access the internet (I blocked it).  My computer was crashing every time I clicked any personal file I wanted to open in Word, Excel, Photoshop, Sound Forge, and my computer was going so slow I couldn't stand it.<BR>      All such trouble went away after I uninstalled this mostrous Webhancer garbage that claims in its documentation that it silently sends over the internet the users habits and patterns to a central database.<BR>     I am not the type to take the effort to SUE SONY, but someone will since this unsolicited software is silently installed on the users computer without any choice whatsoever (there is no choose the software you wish to load option at any point-just \\"I accept this agreement\\" buttons a dozen times\\").  It then silently relays personal information to who knows where and it hurts productivity by slowing down your computer.  Since the Minidisk player can accept a microphone and record 5hrs 20min of voice at CD quality, many executives, professinals and inevitably, lawyers will start using it.