Recording
You've got a couple of recording options with the R-70. Unfortunately, speed isn't one of them. This isn't a problem that's unique to the R-70. Portable Minidisc recorders all record at 1X speed. In an age of 16x burners, that's slow. The R-70 packs a digital cable out of the box, probably your best option for recording, but also has the ability to record off a traditional single-plug stereo cable. Other models (R-70PC) also include a USB-to-analog audio converter.

Recording is dead easy with the R-70, and you can do it from a PC's sound card outputs, a stereo, a microphone—whatever you can get an analog or digital signal from. While recording at 1X isn't nearly as fast as burning a CD or copying MP3s over a USB cable, you don't have to go through the process of converting everything to a digital format on your PC. Those of you with massive CD collections will certainly appreciate the ability to record directly from a stereo, rather than having to rip everything first.

If the recorder is recording a digital or analog stream of audio, how does it know when the music is going from one track to another? Silence. When changing tracks on a CD player, there's a momentary period of silence, and the R-70's syncro-recording option indexes a new track automatically. Off a CD player this works great, but it also works well if you want to record things off your computer, since you can stick an 'empty' sound file of a few seconds of silence between songs on your playlist. Occasionally, if a song has a prolonged period of silence in the middle, the R-70 will mistakenly divide the song into two tracks. Fortunately, deleting track markers is a painless process that takes only seconds.

When recording with the R-70, you have two options: normal or monaural. For music, you shouldn't be using anything other than the normal mode. Monaural is really only for recording voice, where quality is less of an issue. The upside of monaural is that it will double the recording capacity, so you can fit 148 minutes of sound onto a 74-minute disc. It's worth noting that some newer Sony models allow you choose between several other recording options to extend disc play time at the expense of audio quality.

The R-70 also sports automatic sound level adjustments, so you won't have to keep adjusting the volume for tracks recorded from different sources. If you want to muck around with the recording level yourself, there's an option to do that, as well.

At any time, even during recording and playback, you can enter names for tracks or for the disc as a whole. These names will scroll across the LCD during playback. With the limited number of buttons on the device, they're a bit of pain to enter. I didn't really bother with them much, since I had either labeled the disc's case with the tracklisting and disc name or knew what track number I wanted anyway. Because I listen to CDs on my stereo so much, I've been conditioned to remember songs more by their track number than their title, but maybe that's just me.