when I bought my minidisc they were about $100, a comparable Creative flash based Mp3 player was 32Mb.
You could have a handful of disks with 80mins of HQ music on each whereas the MP3 players of the time were either very expensive (like the first harddisk iPod) or had so little space you had to chose a few songs for each trip.
The first MP3 player I bought had 128MB. (A Creative Muvo I bought in 2002.) I considered MiniDisk but having to use line-in seemed like such a hassle. (I didn’t have digital equipment and would have had to use the analog route and that just seemed like not worth it at all.)
I can understand how MiniDisk could have looked a bit more attractive a year or two earlier but not really in 2001 or 2002.
You could have a handful of disks with 80mins of HQ music on each whereas the MP3 players of the time were either very expensive (like the first harddisk iPod) or had so little space you had to chose a few songs for each trip.