As Sony's latest portable music machine hits the streets, we wonder just how much smaller these little marvels can possibly get. Measuring less than 10cm in length and weighing only 30g, the Music Clip MC-S50 is a genuinely pocket-sized music player for the 21st century.

The Music Clip is designed to complement the Sony VAIO notebook range but it works happily with any PC that has a USB port. Styled with the trademark Sony purple-grey colour scheme and trendy curves, USB also means it's painless to set up and quick to transfer data.

The Music Clip software is developed for use exclusively with Sony Music products, encoding all your digital files to Sony's own ATRAC3 music compression format before putting them on the Music Clip. Although this format can produce high-quality music in a small file, it unfortunately means a more protracted transfer process than normal MP3 players. The compression is done by the OpenMG application, which can convert most digital audio files, including the most popular MP3 and Microsoft WMA formats.

Once you've chosen and encoded the songs you want, you can then begin to transfer the files directly to the Music Clip's 64Mb on-board memory.

For such a small player, this isn't bad and will provide you with over an hour's music at near-CD quality. However, in our tests, we found that encoding tracks at 64Kbps was good enough for on-the-move playback, meaning that over two hours of music could be squeezed on to the Music Clip at any one time.

Operated by a single AA battery, playback is controlled by a series of buttons situated on the Music Clip. The LCD screen will inform you of track number, play modes and volume settings and a hold switch stops you pressing the buttons by accident.

The bundled Sony-branded headphones complement the outstanding sound generated by the Music Clip and audiophiles will love the mega-bass facility that can crank up the beats. Our only criticisms are its hefty price tag and lack of a remote control.

Contact: Sony
0990 111999
www.sony.co.uk

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A sweet-sounding solution that combines MP3 technology with cassette compatibility.