Now, either that is the price you pay for the no-frills version (screw you, Sony) or I just couldn’t figure out how to transfer like you would to a real disc, but there you go. Also, do you know why I bought one? Because it was big in Japan, and I had grown up on Sailor Moon and Evangelion.

…Yes, I was THAT girl. Ridiculous.

I plugged it into the optical output of my PS2 and recorded all the radio stations in GTA and GTA:Vice City. There was something delectably awesome about driving down the road and listening to Wave 103, commercials and all.

I bought my MZ-N505 in May of 2002, for about $300. At the time, the only MP3 players you could buy for that kind of money were gigantic Discman-sized behemoths. I was looking for something portable. MiniDiscs definitely fit the bill.

Moreover, I was PC-only back then, and didn’t have FireWire on any of my computers. Even if I wanted an iPod, and didn’t mind the fact that it cost twice as much as the MiniDisc player I got, I wouldn’t be able to use it.

In theory I also bought it to bootleg concerts, since there weren’t any MP3 players with optical inputs, but I actually never used it for that purpose so it’s moot.

And how can you not like having a variety of interesting-looking MiniDiscs? They definitely looked like they came from the future. A future that allowed you to personalize your listening experience by using discs that had Hello Kitty silkscreened on them, if that was your thing.

Regardless, I used it for about three years. In those three years, I also special ordered a remote, and flashed the firmware so that I could access all sorts of previously disabled function.

Then the honeymoon ended. The prices of iPods came down, and I began to realize that the ATRAC sound quality was terrible if you wanted to fit more than one CD’s worth of stuff on one MiniDisc. And the software was absolutely terrible.

I ended up buying a third-gen iPod off a friend of mine, and never looked back.

Anyhoo, long story short: MiniDiscs were *the* portable music solution eight years ago, but they weren’t able to keep up the pace with other technologies. Now they’re wholly irrelevant.