Re:Viva la 1980s (Score 1)

Much has chaned in those 2 years since you had a md player. All of those restrictions you named are no longer present in the 2nd generation hi-mds.

- You

The latest players actually have MP3 support, but Sony missed the opportunity and now they're irrelevant compared to the iPod.

- Me

I know. :)

The point is that only after extreme amounts of whining, petitioning, bomb threats (just kidding), etc, for years from the user community did they think it might be a good idea to play along nicely with the format that 95% of the digital music world uses. Even then it was an act of desperation after they realized that everybody else was making better devices than they were for the money and they didn't really have any competitive advantages to justify the crap you had to go through to use a MD. For the most part, everyone else realized that the simplest way of doing things is probably best.

I might be an apologist if NetMD didn't almost ruin my chances of bringing some tunes on an 11 day cruise with me. I eventually figured it out after about 8 hours of frustration. I had to install RealOne just to have basic drag/drop playlist capability (it's not as bad as the old real, but the obnoxious advertising you have to go out of your way to disable is almost as bad as spyware anyway), and I also had to track down a copy of OpenMG from a p2p network (I had lost the original media, and apperantly Sony is overprotective of even a piece of commodity software used to transfer music to a $100 portable music player) to make it work. I finished at 11:30 at night...

Had MiniDisc been the only way I could take music with me at the time, I might have put up with it, but knowing that the there were iPods, a plethra of flash devices and $20 CD players at WalMart that can play MP3 CDs, I felt ripped off.

Guess you have to consider where I'm coming from. I'm sure you know I'm not the only one who, if they didn't have problems with NetMDs, at least took offense to Sony's attitude. The introduction of HiMD only after the MiniDisc format became irrelevant and Sony had to do something to save it looks like an apology to people like me. I can't think of any reason someone would buy a HiMD now considering the alternatives that are out.

If you have a HiMD and enjoy it, then I'm sincerely glad for you. You made a better buying decision than I did. At least I learned to do my research first...