Best Portable I've Ever owned

Has everything you can want in a portable player. I have been using MD's since I was 15 and now 7 years later i still love them. I must admit that I got rid of them for a while because who really wants to record in live time??? Spend 1 hour to record 1 hour of music?!? To me it doesn't make much sense. But here is where the new NETMD come into play.

Recently I was getting tired of lugging my laptop to school to just listen to music. All my portable Cd players broke, my old Aiwa MD recorder stopped recording (and i didnt want to record in real time anyway). So I decided it was time to get an MP3 player. I had several options:

1- Get a true MP3 player with flash memory, memory sticks or whatever else they have out there. But they were too darn expensive for what they offered(64mb, 128mb, 256mb???) Not enough for me

2- HardDrive run portables like IPOD, Nomad Zen, etc..
They seem great as far as memory size, but the battery will only go for like 9 hours and then recharge every day. After that worry about spending 60 dollars on a new rechargeable battery. Plus tooo expensive. If they were cheaper I would consider it. I want this technology to be out for a longer time so all they flaws can be taken care and improvements as well. This is where I see the future of portable players heading.

3- NETMD, Sounds good to me. Long battery life ( I have been using the same 1 AA battery for the past 2 weeks and I use it a lot ). Blank MD's are cheap to buy and 5 hours on one disc sounds cool.

I decide to order one from Crutchfield and start drooling at the idea of getting it already.

Ok so it finally arrives and I must say I think it is beautiful. The IPOD in my opinion looks awful. Everything except the display, I dislike on the IPOD. Now I must say a big drawback is that the display on this player is tinyyy. Cmon SONY!!

First of all, like everything else I buy, I research it first. So I have heard terrible things about this software that comes with it to record music. So I read up on ways around it and I did not even install it. I just copied the driver for the NETMD that came on the CD and that's it. I strictly use REALPLayer for recording music. It does it in a snap, no checking in or checking out music ( Sony's way of trying to prevent illegal file sharing).

The biggest problem with NETMD recorders is that no matter what format you have your music recorded in (MP3, REAlAudio, .WAV, etc...) YOu must have it converted to ATRAC3 (for the non-techies think of it as another type of MP3 format) So I have 80Gigs of MP3's that must be converted to ATRAC3. Not a lot of fun. I just insert the CD i have some MP3's recorded on and drag them to REALPLayer for me. RealPlayer does the rest (converting to ATRAC3 and copying them to my MIniDIsc).This product would be a 10 if you cold copy straight from MP3 format to the MD.

Overall this portable rocks!! And I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for music on the go.