I love my MD player. I queue up 80 minutes of songs in winamp, plug in my MD recorder into the VersaJack of my Santa Cruze, hit record on the MD and play on winamp. 80 minutes later, its done. That's really my only complaint, real time recording (although the netmd models are supposed to be faster). I do digital rips of songs off of my CDs with my DVD player, the quality is very good.
Still, with flash memory gettign cheaper and cheaper, it's almost just as good to go with a MP3 player. You don't have the digital ripping ability, and if you encode your songs at super high bitrates, you'll never come close to matching the capacity of a MD.
My MD player is getting less use now that I bought a pocket pc. I've got a 32mb memory card and can fit about 20 songs on it using WMA encoding, at no real loss in quality (or at least that I can tell through my car stereo). Paid about $210 for the pocket pc, which is pretty good for a mp3 player, mobile movie player, and a scheduler.
For minidisc stuff, check out
www.minidisco.com. They carry just about everything you'd ever need.