I always wanted to be able to use it with a computer to store files as well, alas that required a special drive. While it existed never really took off (at least in Australia).
Memory chips might be the future, but minidiscs still look cooler. Cool enough for Neo to sell one in the Matrix :D
My only gripe with NetMD is that you can put things onto MD from a computer, but it's an analogue trip back for recordings. This was an architectural decision due to DRM restrictions. One day I'd like to have a go at trying to bypass this, but it looks like a massive pain in the hole and I only have one MD recorder.
That does sound really cool that it preserves the track markers though!
(Another movie I'd put in this group, Arnold Braunschweiger's "Last Action Hero" incidentally also has some mini disc usage)
And then in the years after I found out that there is an open source firmware for them at rockbox.org, contributed to the project for a few years until at some point the iPhone (3? 4? something around there) with Spotify completely replaced my MP3 player needs.
I even ran a website devoted to equipment (not nearly as successful as minidisc.org). Now I'm nostalgic. It is really too bad that Sony kept the ecosystem so locked down. It was far superior to fragile audio CDs.
I remember playing with the Sony software to put tracks on my minidisc player, encoding then with AAC to get better compression. The thing felt great to use, much better than early MP3 players (the USB thumb drive style ones) but they were superior in nearly every way that mattered. (You could store files on them, more tracks, more battery life).
Anyway. That was a nostalgia trip.
We had cassette walkmans, then CD players, then mp3 players.