"Music, music. I hear music. Music everywhere!" (Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-N510/L)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Sony Net MD Walkman MZ-N510/L
Date:	26/07/04 (2385 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: MiniDisc unit itself is high quality, Unit is easy to use, Excellent sound quality

Disadvantages: Software is appalling, Software is hard to use, Digital rights management

I've had a MiniDisc recorder for ages, but fancied a change despite being a bit low on funds. I wanted something which didn't take me eighty minutes to fill a full MiniDisc and I have an inherent, but probably illogical, distrust of mp3 players due to one too many hard drive failures in the past and modern mp3 players are nothing more than glorified hard drives in fancy boxes. However, someone was obviously smiling upon me and I happened to win a brand new MiniDisc recorder in a competition.

Given the size of the MZN510, the box is surprisingly large but once you open it up, you see why. Not only is the MZN510 in the box, but there's the obligatory instruction manual, a CD for the SonicStage software, a USB cable, an optical cable, power supply, rechargeable battery, two carrying cases (one for a battery and one of the MZN510) and your headphone (with a remote control).

As was the trouble with any new gadget, the urge to play with it was overpowering. However, I didn't want to ruin my new toy and my stroke of good fortune so I set about reading the instructions.

They were clear and easy to understand and the instruction manual is fairly hefty at around a hundred pages covering both the MiniDisc recorder and the accompanying software.

? The MiniDisc Player/Recorder

The MZN510 can be used as an ordinary MiniDisc player (recording via the included optical cable) or it can be connected to your PC and music can be downloaded to it via the SonicStage software. The really good thing worth noting is that either way you choose to use your MZN510, you can use ordinary MiniDiscs. That means, if you're upgrading from an "ordinary" MiniDisc player/recorder, you have no added expense of buying special MiniDiscs. You can even play your older, already recorded, MiniDiscs. You can't, however, play MiniDiscs recorded using the MZN510/SonicStage software combination on older MiniDisc players.

If yo
u've used any kind of portable audio equipment before, then the normal use of the MZN510 will be second nature to you. It has all the usual buttons for play, stop, pause etc. in sensible places; they're all solid enough and don't require three inch long nails to push. They're all "click" kinds of buttons, so you're in no doubt when you've pressed one.

Coming from Sony, you'd expect the build quality to be good, and for the most part it is. I have one or two minor doubts about the plastic back of the MZN510. The "hold" and "eject" buttons are plastic which isn't much of a problem because they seem solid enough, although my previous MiniDisc player was all metal. The battery compartment is also plastic, and unlike my older player, the door has a bit of give to it causing it to rattle a bit which is a minor annoyance.

There is a jog proof mechanism enabled, which is good and a lot better than my old MZR70. I don't use the MZN510 when running around as such, but it's usually in my backpack which does get thrown around a bit and I've not really encountered any problems with track skipping and the like.

The sound quality will obviously depend on the quality of your original source material, but I have been really impressed with this both when recording straight from CD and from importing mp3s of various quality (128kbs and upwards).

Speaking of sound quality, the MZN510 uses Sony's ATRAC3 compression (if you think of ATRAC as Sony's version of an mp3, then you've got the basic idea) and MDLP (Long Play) technology which basically means that you can cram twice as much onto a MiniDisc as you used to be able to with MDSP. This means that when using LP2, you can get 160 minutes of music onto a MiniDisc and with LP4, that's increased to 320 minutes. Sound quality is a factor here though, and with LP2, the ATRAC3 compression is approximately 132kbps and
LP4 is approximately 66kbps. LP2 encoded tracks will be of very good quality (after all, most mp3s on the Internet are encoded at 128kbps and their sound quality is very good/excellent). LP4 tracks are definitely of poor quality though, but seeing as LP2 enables you to fit almost 3 hours worth of music onto a MiniDisc, I doubt you'd use LP4 too much.

The headphones and inline remote are, of course, up to the high standard expected from Sony. The head phones are comfortable to wear and the cable (with remote) is a decent enough length to be able to store the player almost anywhere on your body. The remote can be a bit fiddly to use at times, but there's a clip which lets you attach it to a jacket or shirt etc. is a nice touch and makes using the remote a lot easier.

The last point to mention is the connection to your PC. This is a simple procedure and exactly the same as attaching any USB device to your PC. The instructions are clear enough, if you are in any doubts about how to go about it.

If you want more specifications, then visit the Sony website:
http://products.sony.co.uk/productdetail.asp?i d=1_24_2586

? The SonicStage software (v1.5)

While looking pretty enough, I don't think I'm being unfair when I say that the SonicStage software is one of the most awkward to use programs I've ever encountered. Nothing is intuitive and everything is hard work. When importing your music to SonicStage (which you must do ? there's no copying straight onto MiniDisc for you!), you'll find that once it's been read into SonicStage's database, chances are that you'll encounter your first problem. I'm not entirely sure how SonicStage operates, but at least half of my tracks are displayed using the tag information from the mp3 file and the other half is displayed as the filename. This is incredibly annoying if you are trying to find specific tracks.

Secondly, trying to actually copy
the tracks across is yet more work. Unless you select tracks one by one, you can't choose the order of them on the MiniDisc. Say, for example, I choose ten tracks in a specific order and copy them across to the MiniDisc all at once, they are copied across in the order in which they appear in your library and you must then rearrange them manually on the MiniDisc side.

When copying tracks across from your music library to the MiniDisc, you're never told how much space in terms of running time. As the Sony requires everything to be in ATRAC3 format and chances are, your music is in a different format, you can't simply say "Oh, I have 50MB left, so I'll choose 50MB of mp3s". This means that if you are trying to pack a MiniDisc as full as possible, you might find that you run out of space before your favourite tracks are added meaning yet more fiddling around to get your perfect compilation.

Where Sony seems to have gone wrong is the lack of an intermediate stage where the program can carry out any audio conversion. The user can do any editing e.g. song title or running order and the program can display how much time/space is left on the MiniDisc.

Sony uses a form of digital rights management (DRM) in the SonicStage Software which means that each track needs to be "checked out" to your MiniDisc. Each track in your library can be checked out a maximum of three times at once (meaning you can have three copies on various MiniDiscs). If you want to record another compilation featuring a specific track, you'll need to check in one version so that it can be used again. The 'library' analogy is quite apt here. The DRM is a pain in the arse, really, but to be honest there are other things about the software which I find more annoying. A MiniDisc created from SonicStage (i.e. with DRM intact) means that you can't manually edit the MiniDisc from the player itself ? any editing (and that included deletin
g tracks) must be done from within the software package.

I believe you can get OpenMG drivers and the like so that you can use RealPlayer or Microsoft Media Player to play ATRAC encoded music, but I am not sure about transferring tracks to your MiniDisc player using these software packages or whether this option would be any easier than using the dedicated software.

? Overall

I really like the MZN510 ? it's handy to carry around, the MiniDiscs can contain a lot of music, it's very easy to use and the sound quality is excellent. Added to that, I think the battery life is pretty damned good, too. If I were rating this on its own, I'd have no hesitation in dishing out five stars. I've been using the MZN510 for six months now and the unit is still performing brilliantly and I've not had any problems with it.

However, the software must be considered, too. SonicStage is, quite frankly, pants. The DRM aspect is annoying, and it still takes ages to properly compile a full MiniDisc due to the foibles of the software e.g. having to sort your tacks and then rename them if necessary. It looks good and the basic idea is good, but six months down the line and I'm still swearing loudly at it. I'm hard pushed to give this any more than two stars (and even then I think I'm being generous).

If you're looking at this from a MiniDisc only hardware point of view, it's not hard to justify why you should own one of these, but the SonicStage software and DRM aspect really has a large influence on this. If you've got a bit more money to spend that the eight quid that this costs, you'd probably be better investing in an mp3 player.

Sadly, I can probably only give this package an average of about three stars as you can't really get the best out of the (excellent) MiniDisc unit without the software, which is appalling.

Summary: