The Bottom Line: The player itself is very high quality, Buy it, you won't regret it, I am extremely happy with it, Just don't use the included software, use Realone.

First of all, The PLAYER is excellent it's amazing, so small sounds, so good.It looks really good black with chrome buttons, a small purplish display. It's about the thickness of a thick slice of bread, square, and about as the same size from your 0(ins)key to the 7(home) key. It has alot of features it has volume going to 30, equalizer Bass (-4 - 3) Treble (-4 - 3), it will scroll track titles,disc titles, group titles, and even show audio quality. OK it does not transfer MP3's to itself,this confused me at first, but this is how it works, it recognizes the ATRAC format, so it convert's MP3's to ATRAC and then Records them to the MD, ATRAC actually sounds alot better than MP3. It gives you three recording options SP(Full Size) Lp2(105 kbps) Lp4(66 kbps) I have yet to record in SP because Lp2 sounds so good, I cannot tell a difference between Cd audio and Lp2, that's how good ATRAC is. Lp4 is alright, some songs transfer well and sound pretty good for 66 kbps, but some songs don't fare to well. the lows and highs are still there, but it tends to muddy the middles, but with the equalizer you can kind of counteract this. You can fit about 70 songs in Lp4 and 40 on Lp2, I can only fit 120 short songs on a cd so it's not that bad. The battery life is excellent, it will run for 50 hours on 1 AA. The search function is good, you can skip forward at a fast rate but still hear every word in the song. Ok negatives, this bugs me THERE IS NO DC INPUT! What the hell? Every piece of audio electronics have some sort of power adaptor, I don't think it would've add that much more to the price, also no Backlight also another
thing they could've added without added that much to the price. The display is beveled so sometimes it's hard to see because of reflections. Ok this is really the big negative, the software Sony includes is absolutely the biggest piece of garbage and trash I have ever used in my life, it also has bullsh!t restrictions. It crashes everytime you use it, it makes a copy of every song you put on the MD in .OMG format which eats hard drive space. If you put a song on the MD you have to "Check In" or "Check out" the song if you don't it takes away the amount of times you can burn the song, if you don't check it in more than three times, you can't use the song anymore, it's bullsh!t to protect copyright crap, it didn't recognize half my songs, oh it would take the time to burn them but would come up silent on the MD. But there is an alternative Realplayer, if you look through your paperwork you will find a little pamphlet describing extra software, it will give you a website to download the REALONE plugin. This works good and doesn't have Check In, Check Out, but it still doesn't recognize 100% of my songs and you can't edit groups so you still have to use OMG.