The NetMD players were way too little and way too late. While a NetMD player could load music via USB onto a disc the software on the PC was terrible and the pr

The NetMD players were way too little and way too late. While a NetMD player could load music via USB onto a disc the software on the PC was terrible and the process wasn't much better than recording from the line-in. If you were loading music from MP3 or WMA the software was transcoding those formats to ATRAC, NetMD players didn't natively support either format. So you went from one lossy compression to another. If your MP3s were already at the minimum threshold of quality because they came out of a shitty encoder they were just going to get worse in ATRAC. If you were loading WAVs into SonicStage your quality would be way better but you first had to rip your CD to disk and then load it in to SonicStage. So you had no time savings over ripping to MP3. ATRAC also had a bunch of DRM so it limited how many discs your could load a track on. Not an automatic problem but putting a song on more than a couple discs wouldn't work. Keep in mind that by the time NetMD players were out CD-R drive's were cheap and pretty common. A lot of CD players had also started supporting native MP3 playback and dedicated MP3 players were readily available. The extremely inconvenient NetMD experience was up against cheap CD-Rs, much more convenient MP3 players (including the iPod), and in general a better MP3 experience. The whole MiniDisc ecosystem was just inconvenient unless you had spent a lot of money to live in some sort of end-to-end MiniDisc world.