In Japan, where you can rent CDs, Minidiscs boomed in popularity for a little while, since people liked to record rented CDs onto Minidisc. They took off in Europe for a little while too, but in America, the format never really gained any real traction. I blame the fact that Sony has traditionally crippled the upload direction on its Minidisc players' USB connections. Since MP3 player manufacturers have ignored high-quality audio recording (with a few notable exceptions, such as iRiver's iHP line), there's a vacuum for Minidisc recorders to fill in the area of portable recording, but so far, Sony has dropped the ball, alhough DJs and other people who need high quality portable recorders continue to use them in limited numbers, despite this limitation.
From the information available so far, it's hard to say for sure whether this new Sony Hi-MD MZ-RH1 ($300 or so) will be able to upload recordings directly to a computer, or whether you'll have to record the audio onto your hard drive in real time (yawn) as with previous units. I like the doomed Hi-MD format – each Minidisc holds 1GB of data, so you can fit a lot of music on there, and it can be fun in a retro sort of way to make mix discs rather than playlists. Still, the fact that Sony's going to release this model (with or without an upload feature) speaks more to the failure of MP3 player manufacturers to sell units that can record at a high quality than it does to any sort of real return of the Minidisc format.
