[rayne]

i have a standalone md deck in my hifi which has netmd, i think it's a lot better than having to track down working & affordable portable md players with netmd, as they are very coveted by collectors

Ooh, nice!  I don't have room for one right now, but I'd love it in the future.  And then a portable player (not recorder) with better battery life.

I imagine full-size decks would be easier to repair, too, and I'm not very skilled in that area, so that would be welcome.

What kind of standalone deck do you have?  Would you recommend it?

i've got a Sony MDS-JE780, I really like it! it's got NetMD, optical and RCA audio connections, it's even got a PS/2 keyboard port for titling discs if that's your thing

i use it primarily via NetMD, a wrote a small Go utility to transfer albums over from the cli, which is pretty handy

and yeah it's really easy to open up and work on, i already swapped the power cord on it over to an australian one (i got it from the UK) and have done a belt replacement on the disc loading assembly and it's all working 100%

MDLP is also handy, the quality is totally fine imo and you can fit a couple of CDs on a single MD that way, useful for albums which span two discs (like Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile, for example)