Im thinking about getting my daughter an mp3 player, how difficult is it to download music onto it?
I note this question was posted to a page about Minidisc players, so just to be sure, this article covers both formats as they are very different.
MP3 - by your daughters standards - should be childsplay.
Loading files will be as easy as moving any other documents around a WINDOWS based PC.
Apple files work differently but just as easily and most likely she is already VERY familiar with how this is done, even if it should prove to be new to you.
MP3, occasionally malfunctions but majority of time entirely due to software or media corruption since few players have any moving parts.
Hundreds of legitimate websites will sell tracks for peanuts and of course she can transfer the existing media you have at home by "ripping" (to use the pc term,) whereby a PC will read and convert a CD format recording very quickly into an MP3 file.
Minidisc - to be avoided UNLESS, I repeat UNLESS THERE IS A SPECIFIC REASON FOR SELECTING MD. See examples.
Minidisc is all but obsolete having been abandoned by the pioneering manufacturers very shortly after it was born in the early 1990's. However, it was literally kept alive by a strong faithful owing to a couple of particularly strong traits associated with the format.
Playing faults are very few because MD generally gives the best of both worlds.
CD players (portables aside) are fine providing you don't move them about, MD players have large BUFFER MEMORIES meaning that as the disk starts playing the machine reads what's coming up ahead and stores this in the buffer ready to recall the data if the machine gets bumped or jolted in such a way that causes the read head to lose its track. Imagine two people reading the same book, the boy reading out loud reads one page behind the girl reading silently. Every time he gets lost, she picks up the tale reciting the words from her last page....and to your daughter's ears it all moves seamlessly.
For this reason musicians requiring music playback still love MD because there is no software to crash mid-performance and no disc to jumping effects the way vinyl did in the 80's.
Despite this ONLY choose MD if these features are of essential value to your daughter.
Minidiscs are increasingly hard to find. Minidisc machines are out of production with the exception of second user, remnant stocks and some eye-wateringly expensive professional models.
Software is an issue because very few machines were designed with the foresight to accommodate the interaction with a PC that we now take for granted. Lastly the specification revolves around the technical standards that were "advances" twenty years ago. Therefore 80 minute capacity per disc is typical, but pitiful by today's benchmarks. Your daughter could copy hundreds of hours of music to even the most basic of today's MP3 players, such is their typically vast memory capacity.
Hope this is of some value.
You'll need a MDPORTDG2 which is an after market accessory 
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