I made a special trip to London from Scotland to get myself the MDS-PC3 as soon as I could - a few online shops were advertising it but none had it.

The unit is smaller than I imagined but sits nicely under my JVC mini-hi-fi unit. The black- on-white display is very bright and needs to be read from straight-on to see what's happening. The unit's controls are tiny for my muckle fingers, but thankfully a credit-card remote control is included - and of course it can all be controlled from my PC!

The unit has analogue in/out at the back, along with a set of digital TOS link in/out connectors. There's also the all-important PC link, via the included PCLK-MN10 USB adaptor. This connects to the MDS-PC3 with a PS/2 type lead and the supplied audio cables. The PCLK- MN10 connects to the PC via a supplied USB lead. Finally you get the M-Crew software for controlling the unit from the comfort of your PC.

Connecting the MDS-PC3 to my PCs has been pretty straightforward. It works well on a Pentium-2 machine running Windows ME but had a few hiccups on an AMD K6-2-500 running Windows 98SE - this might be because of the PC's lack of handling digital recording off the CD-ROM - a prerequisite. My main machine is a P3 running Win2000 - although the software says that it's designed for use with Win98, it works fine - I guess it's a USB thing. The only problem I have with this machine is that the CD-ROMs are SCSI and again this is problematic for digital recording - slipping in an IDE DVD sorted it.

The unit has lots of neat features like four times recording - 320 minutes on a MD - but of course these can only be replayed on a capable player. Using the M-Crew software you can edit the recording levels of a track, effect a fade in/out plus all the usual move/combine/split, etc - all made much easier using the PC.

The main reason I got the unit was for easier labelling - this is so much easier than fiddling with jog dials. My only disappointment in this field is that M-Crew doesn't link up to any online CD databases - I have to find the track details and copy/paste them into M-Crew - next year's project is to write a bit of code to get it to link to CDDB, unless Sony beat me to it!