Hi,

I've got a couple of questions on "mp3" players , eg hard disk based
(ipod, iriver, sony), or Sonys minidisc atrac hi-md players.

At the moment, I'm considering either the Sony NW-HD3 hard disc
player, or one of their new hi-MD minidisc players, but have a
question on playback.

At present I have a Sony NE711 atrac CD player, burning tracks to CD
on my PC. My only two criticisms are size (hence the desire to
upgrade) and that due to how it works, there is a couple of seconds
pause between tracks whilst it spins up the CD to read off the next
one. Most of the time this is OK, but on a few CDs it can be annoying
as the CDs were produced so the tracks would play without any gap, and
can lead to the last couple of seconds of one track being on the start
of the next.
Now, My query is, do Sony's hi-md minidisc players, or the HD3 suffer
this issue ? Are there other "mp3" players (preferably supporting
WMA), that i may want to consider that would play the tracks as
intended (ie without a couple of seconds enforced gap), or is this an
inherent design feature of new technology. ie do any current mp3
players pre-load the next track before the current has finished ?

For the record, I'm after something with a reasonably long battery
life, at least 16 hours or more (so an IPOD is out), and one of the
major attractions of the HD3 is its size compared to other 20GB media
players. I appreciate the minidisc player (eg mz-nh900) would be
slightly larger, but i've a large number of old minidiscs I could
re-use with it.


Thanks in advance