Review on Sony DNE509 ATRAC3PLUS CD Walkman by Yuan Walsh

The previous review was only silent about the small display, he/she ignored everything else this player has to offer. I bought this player mainly because of its capacity for 490 CDs of songs and also because I trust the Sony name. It has a dot matrix display, a display that uses multiple small dots to show letters and numbers instead of the usual long, parallel, and vertical lines. This means you can include more than just letters and numbers in MP3 or atrac files. The display is small but still easy to read thanks to the dot matrix to save battery life. This is another reason why the 77 hours of battery life of the atrac3plus is unattainable in this price range. Battery life is 72 hours for MP3 CDs recorded at 128 kbps and 48 hours for regular audio CDs. The main reason for the amazing battery life is that this CD player only spins the MP3/atrac3/atrac3plus CD for the first 15 seconds to read the rest of the song and then stops the CD completely! It stops reading from the CD and starts reading from memory. It takes about three seconds to read each new song because the disc has to be replayed. This is the average for traditional CD players. I played the atrac3plus CD with the lid open to see if it was true and everything happened exactly as I described. Skipping the atrac3/atrac3plus CD is not possible after the first 15 seconds because the CD is not spinning! Even ejecting the CD won't let them skip. Trust me, it's very hard to get an MP3/atrac3/atrac3plus CD to skip even the first 15 seconds. There are also 2 G-Protection modes for regular drives. Okay, now about the software. Installed purely on xp home. I started putting in my CDs and converting them to atrac3plus 64 kbps, which is equivalent to 128 kbps MP3 quality due to the higher sound quality of atrac3plus. Those who get stuck on mp3 don't know what they're missing out on. You can get an atrac3plus file with the same sound quality but half the bit rate and file size of mp3 and keep the sound quality of a CD at 64 kbps. In other words, you can double the number of songs and still keep the same quality as mp3 but with twice the bitrate and file size of atrac3plus. With SonicStage you can convert your MP3 collection to Atrac format. SonicStage only burns Atrac CDs, so you will need to use another program to create MP3 CDs. Converting CD tracks in atrac3plus takes a long time. I got to my about 10th CD and then it wouldn't read the CD because it was too scratched. I pressed "stop" and tried to insert another CD, but it wouldn't read either, even though the CD wasn't scratched. I had to reboot and start over, very annoying. It took me just over three hours to convert 22 CDs in atrac3plus including reboot. When SonicStage starts, there are two columns. You will get your music on the left side and the Atrac CD on the right side. You have the choice: atrac3 with 132, 105 and 66 kbps or atrac3plus with 64 (standard and recommended) or 48 kbps (to get about 490 songs on one CD). Atrac3 compresses your music to about 1/10 of its original size, while atrac3plus compresses your music to about 1/20 of its original size. Remember that atrac is very high quality music compared to mp3 with its bitrate. You start on the left where you have the choice to get the music from a CD or from an mp3 folder on your computer. You must register with CDDB to automatically fill in your ID3 tag information when you insert the CD. You can edit the title and artist information after they appear on the left side. If you have a music album you like, convert it to atrac. Then your music will move to the right side. You can add as many albums as you want. Once they're on the right side, you can add the finishing touches to your artist and track information, and then burn them to CD. Note that you cannot change the ID3 tag information once it has been burned to a CD, but you can return to SonicStage with a CD that already contains atrac songs and continue adding music. This player can handle up to 99 sessions per CD. A session is the number of times a CD has passed through SonicStage to add music. A handy and accurate gauge at the top shows you how many CDs you've burned and how much music needs to be added. Back to the player, the sound quality is just amazing. Bass is properly boosted in Sound 2 mode when using the included headphones. Unlike Panasonics, you can actually turn this player on. The battery compartment is under the cover of the CD player, which I think can be useful if you feel like the batteries have popped out of the CD player. There's really no use for it other than fooling my cousins into thinking it doesn't have batteries when I showed them the bottom of the player. If we talk about the bottom of the player then there is a hold button, I don't know why. It could fit nicely under the opening button. When you close the CD case, the player will automatically read the CD. Don't worry if there's no CD in it reads for a few seconds then turns off. Then you need to press the play button to start playing music. You could turn it off and hit the play button and it would start playing. You still have to press the play button. The Auto Read function can also consume energy. For example, if you have a CD in the player, close the lid and put it back, the player will work for some time without your knowledge. When I put my CD player away with the CD inside, the CD started reading and spinning by itself and nobody pressed any of the buttons. Luckily I was there to stop it. I do not recommend leaving your CDs in this CD player unless you put it aside. I find it ridiculous to put the CD player on hold. I think I can do without the "Auto Read" function. You can scan forwards and backwards through an MP3 file as smoothly as an audio track on a CD. The same cannot be said of other MP3 CD players in this price range. The same can be done with atrak, but everything will not be so smooth. Sony brought back the pause button, some users complained about the lack of Sony players, but the resume function was kept, which I like. Now you can turn off those beeps that you hear when you press a key. There are AVLS that I have no reason to use. This CD player has programming. Sony calls it the bookmark function. You can program your favorite songs and this player will store them on your CDs. You can program the CD in any order. Thanks to the bookmark function, you don't have to program your favorite songs every time you insert one of your favorite CDs. If you insert a CD with favorites, this player will remember your selected favorite and can play it if you want. You can program up to 99 songs for each regular CD and this player can store your favorite songs on 10 regular CDs. For MP3 CDs you can program up to 400 files and this CD player stores your favorite files for 10 MP3 CDs. For Atrac you can program up to 999 songs per CD and it saves your favorites on up to 5 Atrac CDs. Unlike my previous Sony CD player, the D-E220, it is CD-RW compatible. It also plays MP3 CDs from 16 to 320 kbps, including variable bit rate (VBR). Yes, it's ID3 tags and CD-Text, which some other players at this price point don't have. Generally excellent quality and price.