Sony has announced the Australian release of its latest MiniDisc portable player, the Net MD. We give you the lowdown on what to expect in our First Look.

The portable music player market is a particularly vicious one, with a large number of brand name and no-name vendors all plying different re-inventions of the wheel to music-hungry consumers. Sony's latest crack at wheel re-imagination revolves around the MiniDisc format and will be released in Australia in April.

MiniWhat?
MiniDisc as a format has been around for a decade now, but has always occupied something of a niche in the Australian market, especially when it comes to legal music playback. The format is popular in Asian markets, but a quick search of major Australian online retailers found a distinct lack of music in MD format. Sanity Music lists one single MD title -- a live album by Deep Purple -- while HMV lists nothing. Searching for smaller online retailers will unveil other Australian MiniDisc music options -- but who really wants to pay money to listen to Kriss Kross on MD?

As such, launching a music device such as the Net MD is an interesting move on Sony's part. Sony is keen to point out that MiniDisc sales in Oz are booming; up 72% on the previous year according to Rob Nelson, Sony Australia's group marketing manager for Audio products. Still, even Sony's own promotional material notes that MiniDisc is popular not amongst the music crowd but amongst those who need to record spoken material such as journalists and university students. It is also popular among those who make use of spoken word books. As such, the hook of the Net MD to the existing MD using crowd is quite obvious -- it just offers more features -- but in a field as competitive as portable Net music, the Net MD may have difficulty distinguishing itself from the crowded field.

Long play, but will you listen?
The first player Sony aims to bring to market in Australia is the MZ-N1, first launched in Japan in December last year. Like recent MiniDisc players, it supports standard MiniDisc playback as well as the extended play modes that Sony refers to as MDLP2 and MDLP4. Depending on who you talk to, standard MD format sound should be indistinguishable from CD quality audio, although this certainly isn't true for the long play modes. LP2 doubles the playback length of MiniDiscs, and likewise, LP4 is quadruple the length of a disc. The catch is the lower bit rate that LP2 and LP4 utilise. LP2 is encoded at around 132kbps and LP4 uses only 66kbps encoding. Owing to the proprietary way that both modes encode audio, neither can be defined as true stereo, although the appreciable effect of this does depend on the audio system the MD player is connected to. It's still not the same as CD quality, though -- even the pro-MiniDisc site minidisc.org notes that LP4 has "noticeable artifacts" that you can hear. LP2 and LP4 are great for spoken word recordings, though, as the need for picky sound quality is lessened.

Connects easily, but slowly
The MZ-N1 connects to a PC -- at this stage Macs are not supported -- via standard USB, which puts it at the back of the pack in terms of connection speed. Certainly, if speed is your criteria you'd be better off looking at Apple's iPod, which uses Firewire connections for speeds potentially thirty times faster than standard USB. This isn't the first time that it's been possible to link MiniDisc players to PCs; there are unofficial devices that will perform this function, but it's the first time Sony's launched an official device along with supporting software.

NetMD devices use OpenMG Jukebox to transfer songs to MD players, and this forms the cornerstone of Sony's attempt to control piracy of music titles. It's not possible to transfer material from the MD player to PC, which may disappoint anyone using MD as a recording format for their own works. Material is encoded using Sony's ATRAC3 format on the host PC before transfer to the player itself. The higher compression rates (hence less data) of LP2 and LP4 transfer significantly faster than standard rate MD audio, but the caveat there is the considerably lower quality of the material transferred.

We'll let you know how well the NetMD performs, how noticeable the compression is and how well the piracy prevention works when we get hold of a unit for comprehensive testing.

Sony NetMD MZ-N1
Company: Sony
Price: AU$899
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 13 7669
Release date: April 2002

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