The Bottom Line: This thing won't play MP3's. It's proprietary out the yin-yang. Did Sony invent the concept of "sucks" somewhere along the line, or maybe patent it?

Sony's MiniDisc (MD) format was, at one time, almost a good idea. The now largely orphaned format was brought about ten years after the advent of the Compact Disc (CD) format and was touted as a better, smaller replacement for the cassette tape. The technology was doomed form the start, however, for a multitude of reasons, technical and otherwise.

MiniDiscs never really gained a foothold versus the cassette tape because of the prevalence of existing cassette equipment (especially stateside) and record companies' reluctance to invest in Sony's militantly proprietary format. Foremost, however, the MiniDisc was stomped soundly by CD's. Compact Discs offered larger disk capacity, resulting directly in higher sound quality. A CD can hold 650 megabytes of data while a MiniDisc holds a shade under 160 megs. MiniDisc data is lossily compressed (sound data is thrown away in favor of lower physical track size in the hopes that the listener won't notice) and CD data is completely uncompressed. CD's were and still are cheaper, and CD playing hardware is far cheaper to produce because CD hardware is physically simpler – Less of a computer is needed to play back CD audio than to decompress and play back MD audio.

Recordable and rewritable CD's came about not long ago and MiniDisc should have, by the laws of capitalism, dropped dead.

But it didn't.

Sony's MiniDisc format is still alive and kicking. Commercial records have long since ceased being released in MiniDisc format, but now Sony is trying to push MiniDisc technology as an alternative to flash memory based MP3 players.

Meet the MZ-NE410. "NetMD" to its friends. It's the pinnacle of everything Sony's almost done right over the years, with the emphasis on "almost".

The simplest and most logical modernization of the MiniDisc player would be to build one that can play MP3 files directly off of a disk. MD is an all digital format, and a data MD standard exists – MD's can be used to store data just like giant floppy disks. If such a product existed it would have a lot going for it: MiniDiscs are relatively shock- and skip-proof (moreso than CD's and the now prevalent Ipod-esque tiny hard drives), very cheap compared to flash based memory and said tiny hard drives, rewritable, truly portable, the whole bit.

Sony, of course, elected not to do this. Why, building an MP3 capable MiniDisc player would completely undermine Sony's efforts to make absolutely everything they produce proprietary to the point of uselessness. They've already invented their own DRM standard, their own flash memory format, and their own audio compression format - Apparently to ensure that the rest of the universe forever remains mutually incompatible with Sony's little technological padded cell.

So the NetMD is, technically, incapable of playing MP3's. Its packaging does its very best to sell you the NetMD as an "MP3 player", don't be fooled, because it isn't. It is also incapable of recording to a MiniDisc in real time, as previous MiniDisc recorders have done (liken the process to recording to a tape). Instead, the NetMD connects to a computer via the supplied USB cable (it terminates in a proprietary connector on one end) and audio data is downloaded to the player via Sony's proprietary software in their own backwards little compressed format which is… Wait for it… Proprietary.

Gee, I'll bet no one saw that one coming a mile off.

The only way to move music onto this player is via Sony's SonicStage software, which was evidently written entirely by marketing visionaries, and likely marketing visionaries on crack. No programmers were involved in this project; If there were, they would have shot whoever it was that wound up writing the code.

In lieu of providing actual functionality, SonicStage provides a swoopy, postmodern interface that is mind numbingly slow on even the fastest machine. Instead of an intuitive layout or comprehensible documentation it is deceptively arcane while being just smarmy and cookie-cutter enough to make itself the single most aggravating piece of software I have ever used, and I include Windows XP in that statement.

SonicStage is riddled with bugs, and I was able to consistently reproduce quite a few during the course of my evaluation of the program. The file list in the import screen does not automatically refresh when you switch back to it after using it once, and files that no longer physically exist (if you leave SonicStage and move, rename, or delete them) can be loaded and sent to the player, which results in errors. Checking in files after you've moved or renamed the sources will fail every time. SonicStage consistently does not close properly when you tell it to and continues running in the background, eating almost 32 megabytes of system RAM until you annihilate it manually with Task Manager. The list goes on.

No adequate documentation is provided with SonicStage, only a halfhearted installation guide and several pages of fluff written to attempt to convince the uneducated consumer that Sony's intrusive Digital Rights Management (DRM) system is a Good Thing. More on that in a moment.

The NetMD can play MiniDiscs recorded in the usual "SP" format. It can also play "LP2" and "LP4" tracks, which are more heavily compressed and based on Sony's proprietary (I'm waiting for the duck to drop, here), and somewhat more recent ATRAC3 format.

I am not a fan of ATRAC. Technically speaking, ATRAC is a giant step backwards from Mpeg Layer 3 (The MP3 format we all know and love). To achieve "CD Quality Sound", a standard ATRAC recording needs to have a data rate of 292 kilobits per second. MP3 is generally quoted at CD quality at 128 kilobits per second, though perceived quality will vary depending on the type of music being compressed. On the whole, however, MP3 audio can sound just as good (or better) than ATRAC while taking up less than half of the disk space.

These numbers apply only to recording to the MiniDisc in SP mode, mind you. That's 74 minutes per standard disk, the same length as a commercial CD. The NetMD can record in LP2 and LP4 format (it records in LP2 by default), cramming 160 and 320 minutes of audio onto a standard sized disk, respectively. Note that these more heavily compressed recording modes can never provide truly "CD Quality" sound (though the normal SP mode's claim to doing the same is also suspect in some circles), but generally speaking LP2 mode is adequate for all but the most critical listeners. I found that tracks recorded in LP4 mode sounded pretty horrible on playback, with a distinct lack of midrange frequency response.

Given this, I cannot fathom why Sony chose to make the NetMD capable of playing only their own inferior format instead of the technically superior, universally accepted MP3. Pure pigheadedness is the only explanation I can offer.

To send songs to the player you must first import them into SonicStage. When you do this it wants to convert the files to ATRAC format and store them on your hard drive, which takes forever, eats precious hard drive space, and is completely redundant and unnecessary. Songs must be "checked out" to copy them to the player, and "checked in" to delete them from the MiniDisc. The whole procedure is time consuming and needlessly complex, as well as very unintuitive.

The bad news gets worse. SonicStage imposes some really lame Digital Rights Management "features" on you, weather you like it or not. Sony tries to pass of this blatant stripping of your digital rights as a "protection to the original copyright holders of your music". You can only check out a song three times without checking it back in. If you check in fails for any reason you permanently lose one check out privilege.

Two things bother me immensely about this. Foremost, it is not Sony's place or right to manage the "protection of the original copyright holders" of my music. I did not pay Sony good money for their opinion on music piracy, filesharing, or any other aspect of the business. Shut up, build your hardware, and let the RIAA handle it. It's an enormous insult to those of us that are using the NetMD and our MP3's legitimately, and it serves no purpose other than to ensure that users are automatically treated like criminals regardless of who they are.

Second, it is not Sony's privilege or right to control the distribution of any data if it happens to be my data. If I use the NetMD or its related DRM-laced technology to store, record, transport, or play my own music that I've recorded myself, purely as an example, it imposes the same limitations without my permission. Likewise, royalty free content and tracks by independent artists licensed for distribution are subject to the same blanket DRM limitations regardless of the opinion of the original artists, and I find this to be an enormous insult to them.

SonicStage by default steals all of your media file extensions, sends usage, system, and personal information to locales unknown without the user's permission, and if used as prescribed will by default convert all of the user's audio collection to a proprietary, DRM limited format. The fact that Sony can get away with bamboozling unprepared users into this nonsense never fails to make me angry.

Towards that end, I did at length discover a workaround to SonicStage's DRM restrictions. The lynchpin of my entire method is Sony's own ineptitude, and it serves them right.

To break SonicStage's checkout limitation: Make a copy of the MP3 you want to copy to your player and import it into SonicStage. Set it not to convert formats beforehand, simply import the file into a playlist. Check out the song to your player as normal. When you're done, delete the song from SonicStage (this can only be done from the recording screen). The next time you import the song the checkout counter will be reset at 3. Songs cannot be deleted from the player via the "Devices / Media" screen without checking them in, but they can be deleted without check in from the recording screen. Delete your spare copies when you're done.

Net result: SonicStage presents a massive hindrance to the casual user but will do nothing to prevent a truly determined music pirate from doing his thing – And that's assuming his thing has anything to do with MiniDiscs, and it probably won't.

On the hardware level, there isn't much wrong with the player itself except for its inability to play MP3's. The player is scarcely larger than the MiniDiscs you feed it, measuring 3 1/8 by 2 7/8 and about an inch thick at the battery bay. It's solidly built, fits together quite nicely without any rattles or squeaks, and is laid out in such a manner that it can easily be controlled from inside your pocket without having to take it out and look at it.

The NetMD player comes bundled with a software CD, USB cable, several readme, registration, and installation guide sheets, and one standard density (74 minute) disk. You also get a pair of dollar store headphones that I suggest you bin straight away and replace with a real set. No batteries are included, but a single AA cell is hardly a rare commodity these days.

The layout is simplistic, but serviceable. The play, forward, back, and stop buttons are all integrated into a four way D-pad sort of arrangement, with a tactile dot marking the play position for blind operation. The volume up button sports a similar tactile dot and the volume down is located directly below. Options are configured via the small LCD display and the "Menu" button, with forward, back, play, and stop manipulating the onscreen options. Repeat track, normal, and shuffle play modes are provided, as well as three bass boost levels (none, moderate, and excessive), power off timeouts, AVLS, information display modes, and so on. The only other controls are the "group" button, which cycles through virtual groups of songs on the disk (if you've set up any) and the hold switch, which locks all other controls and prevents the player's buttons from being inadvertently pressed.

The whole shebang runs for approximately forever off of a single AA cell. I recommend using NiMh rechageable batteries in the player because of their superior capacity and cycle cost that approaches zero. You can squeeze 80 solid hours of playback from a single high capacity NiMh cell easily.

My biggest gripe with the player is that the LCD screen isn't backlit, making it totally unreadable in low light or darkness. The LCD itself is also black on dark purple, which can make it tricky to read even in the light.

There are good points to a MiniDisc player like this one. MiniDiscs, if you can find them retail, can be had for as low as two dollars a disc, which puts them on par with quality cassette tapes and miles ahead of flash memory in the cost-per-megabyte department. Sony has evolved the MD into a relatively skip-proof technology, as well, and an MD player will usually fare better than a CD player in situations that are bound to cause skips – Biking, jogging, car stereos, and so on.

The NetMD smacks of a product that was rushed to market as too little, too late. If it could natively play MP3s, had software that mere mortals could wield, or was just a tad more thoughtfully designed it would be a good player. Even having just one of the above shortcomings would be excusable, but Sony's decision to cripple the player with all three is unacceptable. If you can stomach the software, slow PC to player downloads, and limitations of functionality the NetMD is almost a viable option for a personal portable player. As it stands, there are far less mediocre CD based players available that do a better job for less.

Two stars for effort. None for follow through. Not recommended.