I knew a DJ who had a MD dash unit in his car. It seemed like the coolest thing ever. I had a MiniDisc component unit and a portable or two, one of which was

I knew a DJ who had a MD dash unit in his car. It seemed like the coolest thing ever. I had a MiniDisc component unit and a portable or two, one of which was the one pictured in the article. I dumped the component quite some time ago. I can't bring myself to throw the portable away -- I've got tons of archives of my old college radio show on MiniDisc in a closet. That particular portable depicted in the article was one of the last MD portables at all before Sony decided to pack it in; I think it came out in 2002. It had a USB input, and you could use your PC to push music onto a disk. It suffered from the classic Sony problem that they own a record label and they also make stuff that can copy music, so they made using it a complete pain in the ass in some misguided effort to protect their own interests. You had to use the bundled NetMD software, which would transcode MP3s to the proprietary ATRAC compression format. Then you had to "check out" the songs to the device, in which case they could not be put on any other device until they were checked back in. It encrypted the stuff as it sent it down, and you could not get any digital audio back off the device -- USB was only one-way and it had optical SP/DIF in but not out.