Mini Disaster

I've never thought that minidisks were all that spectacular or groundbreaking even when they came out before flash players and the like. But my experience with this player confirms what I already knew.

In order to use the player/recorder you must install another program (SonicStage) on your computer that wants to catalog and index all of your music and become your default source for all of your music needs. It stinks. The digital rights management part of the program ensures that when you copy an mp3 to a minidisk, the song becomes "checked out" and can only be checked out to 2 or 3 different sources at the same time before it becomes unplayable. Plus, it ensures that at least some of your "freely gotten" music can't be burned to the minidisk to begin with.

Next, in order to cram the maximum amount of music onto a single disc you can set the record mode to LP4 which is noticeably lower quality even for a very unaudiophile like myself. Then, you can only get about 70-80 songs on a single disc.

All of this so far wouldn't be too bad I suppose, but the absolute worst part is that the player still powers itself off of the single AA battery while it is connected to your computer transferring songs. The USB connection doesn't power the player. Thus, you can only transfer about 10-15 songs before the brand new battery that you just placed in the player is completely drained. It takes about 4-5 batteries to record one disc. I can however get about 30 hours of play time (not the 40 claimed) with a fresh battery if I don't mess with the controls too much (like skipping around songs). And if I even think about listening to the radio (which although is a nice feature that gets good reception along with local TV and Weather stations) for just a few minutes, the battery life is hours less.

I received this player as a gift, so my sense of dissatisfaction with it is somewhat mitigated by my investment, but I would definitely NOT recommend this thing to anybody; especially since there are so many other players that are at least as good if not better for the price.

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I have since bought a 1.5V DC adapter at RadioShack that I nigrified to power the player while I am transferring songs. It cost about $15 and is an accessory that should be included with the player to begin with.