I agree with Lester about the Sonic stage software. It's crap. It won't let you do anything and all because Sony are paranoid about DRM, IMO.

I use mine for recording and the recorder itself and the mic I bought for it is fine. However, you have to upload the recordings to the PC via the line out/line in as Sonic stage will allow you to upload your own recordings just once and you cannot edit them once you have them on the PC as they upload in Sony's proprietary atrac format. Intensely frustrating.

Maybe less of a problem if you want to use the MD player as a media player, but it limits is functionality as a recorder.