Excellent memory gonk. ATRAC originally sounded awful. Much worse than 64K MP3 by comparison. It wasn't until ATRAC3 that they actually sounded good. I had various minidisc recorder/players over theyears, inlcuding one for the car, but I got rid of it all as it seems to be an abandoned format by everyone but Sony. With flash memory and harddisks being cheap, not to mention convenience and size, I think minidiscs aren't long to stay around. One big problem they have, which is why they never took off for data storage, is they are very slow.