Ok so i've heard a lot of good things about MD. So many that Im considering going MD instead of buying a new discman.
I have a LOT of mp3's, but not so many that I'd need 5gb's or 10 to store them, and not so few that I'd need 128mb to store a fraction of them.
Also I have heard sound quality produced from mp3 players i poor in comparison to the rich digital sound of an MD. Now my main question about MD is, just what is the longest length of song I can fit onto a mini disc? I have NUMEROUS 1 1/2 hour live sets, and even more sets that go just over the 2 hour mark. I haven't been able to find any program to cut these in half or divide them in any way (does anybody know of anything) but if they made a mini disc that could fit 2 hours of music on it I would buy it right now.
Now another thing I've heard is the MD's sound quality is *almost* as good as CD. So if I were to go portable CD player then does anybody have any reccomendations? I have a old panasonic SL-SW860 one of the metal ones. It produces very nice sound and I like it, but want something less bulky. I noticed the D-EJ1000, and one thing I noticed particularly about this cd player was that it had a crazy long battery life.
I have heard and I believe it to be true that the more time a company takes to develop a discman with very long battery life, is the less care they put into developing the actual sound output device of the discman. Leaving you with a moderate listening experience for 100 hours, hoo boy
So what Im looking for is a discman that has the BEST sound quality over any other discman, thats all I care about.
Any suggestions?

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you are going to mostly use mp3:s as the source when you're recording them on CD:s or MD:s? Because if that's true you won't get any major sound improvements going to MD or CD instead of keeping it on an mp3-player. Do you need to take all your songs with you or not? Because if you don't it's the small mp3-player with flash memory you should get, otherwise it's an HD-player with 10GB that you'll fill up eventually anyway.

I'm a big fan of MD and I'd have to agree with TMC. I wouldn't bother converting all those mp3 files to ATRAC on an MD.

There are flash players now that come with 128 mb of memory and have an expansion slot for a total of 256 mb.

I believe the Nex player will take compact flash up to 1 GB so that should easily hold your live sets.

If you were coming from CD to MD or mp3, then I think the MD hardware would make the music on the go sound better than your typical flash mp3 player. However coming from mp3's, depending upon how well they're encoded, you may not notice the superior sound quality that portable MD units have over portable mp3 flash players.

PS - After having owned a flash player, I would really recommend you consider a hard disk based unit over a flash player though. Hmm I just re-read your post and you want something small, which then dictates a flash player or an MD. Tough call, do you plan on copying CD's for portable use much?

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The latest MD players from Sony have "LP" capacity, several times the original capacity. Quality suffers, though. See:

http://www.minidisco.com/

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Also see:

http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTE...iniDiscWalkman

I am also a big fan of MD and I have ripped MP3s to MD. Many of the small, 128Meg, players have really horrible sound. Their anolog section is terrible to say the least. The MD players just sound great. A 192 kbps MP3 sounds great on MD. The larger MP3 playes tend to be better sounding than their smaller brothren though. If you start with MP3, the better MP3 players are probably your better bet. If you start with CD or .wav, MD can really shine.

Also, what format are your live sets in? If you record them into MP3, you can add track marks right on the player. If you do a lot of live recording, MD wins easy. For live recordings, folks often recommend sharp MD players as the best.

MD formats are as follows.

SP - is the highest quality and can record 74 min or 80 min depending on the disc.

LP2 - offers twice the capacity as SP with astonishingly little degradation in sound quality. You can fit 160 min on an 80 min disc.

LP4 - offers twice as much as LP2 but degrades sound quality too much for me. It's good for recording speech though.

The vast majority of my discs are LP2. This is because in the portable environment, the convenience of higher capacity out weighs the slight hit in sound quality. When I want the best sound quality, I reach for a CD.

Hope this helps.

Although I'm sure it works for many, I didn't care very much for the way that MP3's are transferred to MD by using NetMD. THere iis a translation process to convert MP3 into ATRAC which made the whole thing a bit convoluted. If I had been engineering the project I would have made that step on-the-fly and transparent. The speed of transfer was OK but I just had too many problems with using the software. I found it simpler to write out MP3's to a CD and dub it using one of my decks, which negated the concept. There is new software apparently which makes the whole thing work a lot better. As stuck as I am on MD, I did like the idea of MP3 players for my MP3's. I didn't really want a delicate and expensive-to-replace hard disk player, I shared the concern over sound quality of the stick-type players and I value thinness over overall size (so that it will fit in my jacket pocket) as long as it's not too big. So after doing my research I bought a iRiver IMP400 MP3 CD player today. It's still charging so I don't know what it sounds like yet. reading the manual, it's extremely impressive in terms of feature set.

Hmmm...LP2 format sounds good, but I have more than a few sets that go just over 160 mins to say 165 or 163, basically *JUST* over
Many of my sets are downloaded off the internet (mp3), but when I attend live shows if you know the right people, I know you can plug a MD player right into the DJ's computer and record the set LIVE right there!!!!!!!
Although i dont know of many live 80 minute sets

So I gotta question: How do the MD players sound quality rate in comparison to a ipod or nomad jukebox zen 20gb mp3 players?
Those are the ONLY two players I would consider because I heard they are both excellent in all aspects. Is there bigsound difference between MD and those two players?
Thanks for all the helpful input, I will check out those MD players listed.

I just went and looked at the High Speed Net MD™ Walkman® Recorder MZ-N10. Is that too good to be true or what?
It says it can store up to 5 hours of music using some technology on a 80 minute disc. Is that with a massive loss of sound quality or what? If not and its some miracle technology Ill order that one right away. I would imagine though it cost the same amount as the player to buy enough minidiscs to copy my cd collection

the 5 hour/disc is in LP4. LP4 is suitable for speech recordings but it is very bad for music. I am not sure, but I think the high frequency cutoff for LP4 is somewhere around 14.5KHz. Also, LP4 collapses the stereo image a lot.

Definitely do not use LP4 for live recording, you'll be disappointed.

I don't think you can record a live set with either the iPod or the Zen, but I'm sure Austonia will chime in with the correct answer.

not to sound picky or anything but i use the lp4 to record most of my cd albums onto, and have got some live cd albums recorded into lp4, and to me it is fine, i use my shure e5 phones to listen with my md player (mze 900). I think its good that i could fit 5 albums onto one disc. i don't notice that much difference in sound quality, thats maybe because i don't get too involved in the quality of the sound, rather the music instead

LP4 =
I think it would be worth it to invest in an Ipod or zen. I mean I have a LOT of cd's, but I have even more live sets and recordings that won't fit onto CD-R.
As far as recording goes...ill just have to enjoy it when Im there

If you want to perform that maneuver of hooking the unit up to the DJs computer/mixer/whatever at a show, you might do that with MD. iPod cannot do that. You need a Nomad if you want live recording capability in a hard disk portable. I don't know what sort of MP3 quality Nomad records at, or whether it can record AIFF or WAV, etc.

With acceptable quality (I think LP2 is fine, really), you can record 160 minutes on one MD.

Nomad is suppose to have equal or better sound quality than the Ipod. The nomad actually has a slightly higher sound output than the Ipod. But I am a quality over quantity person. I want premium sound, not ultra loud.
I will buy a mp3 EVENTUALLY. But I think I might pick up a minidisc quite soon.
160 kinda dissapoints me though because I have about 8 absolutely mind blowing sets that all are recorded just minutes and seconds over the 160 mark
Arg, actually those 8 sets are the whole reason I want an mp3, so I can hear them on the go. I think it would be more worth it for me to go for either the nomad or Ipod.
Considering many of my other sets, or single tracks can easily be recorded onto CD-R and I gotta good discman. So point wasting $$ on MD if it's only going to be able to do a most of what I want, and not all of it.
Thanks everyone for all the suggestions and stuff, it has certainly helped me come to a decision.
One last question if anyone sees this,
Does the Ipod's sound come very close to the MD? Or is it really easy to distinguish the difference in quality between the two?