Lets start with LatexFanClub, a premier award winner, and you'll see what I mean. This is not a personal attack on him, since he's an award winner it means that his opinion is very comprehensive, which means he's covered most of the issues, which is why is opinion is an ideal example. All the things he says are alos the things said by other MP3 fans, his review is the best for MP3 players as his crown represents, which is why I'm using his as my example.

First off, horror of horrors, he says 'Music recorders love Minidisks for their sound quality and portability - the only niche market I can see it appealing to.'. What??!! since when was portability a niche market??!! The first thing you think of when you hear of portable music is the walkman.... I'm sorry, the word Walkman and niche market just do not go together. I checked it out in a brandnames book and look what they have to say about it

"Walkman sales have topped 200 million units worldwide and it has become the single best selling consumer electronics product ever produced." - sound like a niche market to you?

So, the walkman was a hit, and it it was was a portable tape player, no recording, no track titles, low cassette tape quality and yet it is the best selling consumer electronics item ever. MiniDisk offers higher than MP3 quality sound, recording, editing, and track naming on a much smaller and longer battery life device.

On compatability, he says than MiniDisk is useless as not that many people have players, despite the fact that sharing MiniDisks is much more practical than sharing MP3 files in Album numbers since MiniDisks are cheap they are easy to trade, which is a little difficult with £60 solid state memory. I know you can share MP3s over the net, but you put MP3s from your coputer onto MiniDisk so this does not give MP3 players any advantage.
Also, any MiniDisk recorded in standard format will play in any MiniDisk playe
r, whereas ther are lots and lots of different solid state memory formats out there. Obviously, MDLP disks can only be played in LP players, but you can easily record from an MDLP recorder to a non-MDLP recorder, plus MDLP player make normal MDs aswell.


He then goes on to give the marks for portabilty as

Minidisk - 7/10
CD-R - 8/10
MP3 - 10/10
WMA - 9/10


But this is not a very good reprisentation of the truth. Although MiniDisks aren;t solid state, they don't skip. Yes, theoretically it can happen, but there's this thing called anti shock pretection, which pre-loads music data then stops the disk spinning which

A) prevents skipping - in the year and a half I've had my player it has never ever skipped

and

B)save a huge amount of battery power as the disk is not spinning more often than it is, which give MiniDisk players their longer battery lives than MP3 players.


Plus, he has missed the most obvious point, if you're going out and want to take more than an hour of music with you, the only way to do this with an MP3 player is to buy a costly second £60 64mb memory card, which will still only leave you with two hours of sub MiniDisk quality music. Fine if you're going on a quick jog, but an absolute nightmare for a holiday, and pretty rubbish for even a day out.


Yeah yeah, I know all the MP3 fans are screaming out that you can get CD and DHard drive MP3 players giving you hours of music. This are an absolute waste of money. Do not even consider them. Look at it this way - you are going to be carting around with you a hardrive which will shatter if you drop or even if you bash it. This is not what i call protable, or piece of mind knowing that your £400 investment could be easily broken. with the CD players, you're left with the nightmare of navigating through hundreds of tracks on a tiny disply traditionally used for 20. You may have hours of
music with you, but it'll be a nightmare to get to. LatexFanClub also reviewed CD players, which I will credit him for because if size doesn;t matter to you, why waste the extar on a tiny player when a Discman will do you just fine? However, the idea behind MP3 and MiniDisk players is esssentially their tiny size, and CD players and HardDrives players do not offer this, which as I addressed above, is a major holdback.



He then goes onto cost effectiveness. A CD walkmen, CD MP3 players, and Harddrive MP3 player do, as he says, offer a cheap form of storidge for their price, however as we have established, this is about protable pocket sized music, and the MP3 versions of both have huge drawbacks. This leaves you with two options - pay £60 per solid state 64mb card, which in my opinions is very bad value, or £1.20 per re-recordable MiniDisk, which is an awful lots cheaper, not much room for any MP3 fans to say the disks are expensive.

He also says in a comment on his review

"I think people who've splashed out the money on MiniDiscs players are generally bitter to have seen them superceded so quickly by superior formats, of which MP3 is lcearly the leader. There really isn't any competition - MDs are too expensive and will quickly become obsolete." yeah we're the one's who are better because we're the one's who bought the product which, for all the reaons I've mentioned, offer an advantage above MP3 on every single level. As for the price thing, refer to what I said earlier - which is cheaper £60 for a re-writable MP£ player card or £1.20 or even less if you shop around for a re-recordable MD?

Now for what some other MP3 fans say -


shmish111 says -

"they [MP3 players] have better quality sound than MD players. " sorry to brake it to you... that's acctually wrong. Ask an expert, MiniDisk is higher quality than 128k MP3, which is what the MP3 man
ufacturers call 'CD quality'.

they then go onto contradict themselves -

"If some one has ever told you that MD is better quality than MP3, then again, they have misled you. MD recorders cut the top and bottom off the sound they are recording to fit it all on their tiny disc. This means they always sound very screechy, and not rich sounding, they are not CD quality. MP3 on the other hand can be recorded in better than CD quality if you want, although most MP3 music comes from CD's, so it's usually just CD quality. "

Burn an album of MP3 128 onto a CD and you will see how little space it takes up. MP3 also compresses the music!!! that's the whole point of it!!!! Plus, you cannot record MP£ at higher than CD quality, the highest you can record MP3 at is 320kbps, record something at that bitrate, and it takes up less sapce that a CD file.. why? because it's still being compressed! 128k is NOT CD quality, it's what they call CD quality because they think it sounds like CD quality, but remember, they want to sell you their MP3 player.







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And now for the big one......................





The reason why people buy MP3 players is simple - to put on all those MP3s they downloaded from the net. But if you think about it MiniDisk is recordable... so where do you record it from??? Obviously, you have a line-in on your MiniDisk player, which you connect to your computer line out, and record your MP3s with it! Still not happy? In need of a USB connection to your computer? well, you can acctually buy an Minidisk play with a USB connection to your PC! There you go, now there is nothing that an MP3 player can do that's acctually worht while that a MiniDisk player can't. Numerous MP3 fans have commented on how there aren't many title available on MD - please, did you acctually think any MD
fans bought stuff on MiniDisk? The whole point of MiniDisk is that it's recordable! Why pay £15 for an MD album when you could pay £10 for a CD and put it onto a blank MiniDisk?







Why do music journalists go on about MP3 players? Because they're cought up in the Napster hype.

Why do technology/computer jounalists go on about MP3 players? Because MP3 is a bi-product of the computer industry.



Conclusion....




MP3 is a bi-product of the computer industry, MiniDisk is a b-product of the Music/Consumer Electronics industry (remember Sony have their own record label).




If you want a piece of technology to enhance the way you listen to music, choose MiniDisk;

If you want another way to bring computers into everyaspect of your life MP3 is for you, but really that's the only reason I can see for anyone buying a MP3 player.


Still not sure? Love both technology and music? I do to, but MiniDisk offers you extremely high portablity, sound quality and most of all freedom and flexablitiy.

Overall there is no doubt about it, MD is the clear choice, post a comment if you disagree, but there are really no reasons to choose MP3 over MD.




~~obviously, the product ratings refer to a MiniDisk player, not MP3 player~~