Per the Wikipedia article [1], it seems like in the 2001 timeframe there were "NetMD" devices which could receive digital audio directly from a computer at much faster than realtime; I imagine this was a direct response to the iPod and other MP3 players, and was probably too little, too late. Particularly when it sounds like the process was bogged down by making you use proprietary, copyright-aware software.
The NetMD players were way too little and way too late. While a NetMD player could load music via USB onto a disc the software on the PC was terrible and the process wasn't much better than recording from the line-in.
If you were loading music from MP3 or WMA the software was transcoding those formats to ATRAC, NetMD players didn't natively support either format. So you went from one lossy compression to another. If your MP3s were already at the minimum threshold of quality because they came out of a shitty encoder they were just going to get worse in ATRAC.
If you were loading WAVs into SonicStage your quality would be way better but you first had to rip your CD to disk and then load it in to SonicStage. So you had no time savings over ripping to MP3. ATRAC also had a bunch of DRM so it limited how many discs your could load a track on. Not an automatic problem but putting a song on more than a couple discs wouldn't work.
Keep in mind that by the time NetMD players were out CD-R drive's were cheap and pretty common. A lot of CD players had also started supporting native MP3 playback and dedicated MP3 players were readily available.
The extremely inconvenient NetMD experience was up against cheap CD-Rs, much more convenient MP3 players (including the iPod), and in general a better MP3 experience. The whole MiniDisc ecosystem was just inconvenient unless you had spent a lot of money to live in some sort of end-to-end MiniDisc world.
I had a NetMD from Sony, and I absolutely loved the thing. I still have a couple disks I made, with no way to play them back.
My apartment was burgled in 2003, and the insurance payout covered an iPod to replace the stolen minidisk player.
Night and day, no comparison, that iPod was the coolest thing I owned at the time, and stayed that way for many years. It's in storage right now, but the last time I plugged it in, a couple years ago, it still worked. The battery is toast, though.
Pretty much every generation of iPod has upgrade options available for both the storage and the battery. Definitely dig out your unit and see what you can do for it.
iPods are still cool, and becoming quite collectible. I'm starting to collect them myself, especially older ones that are repairable, and even upgradable with higher capacity batteries and CF to SD card converts - so you have a higher capacity device, with a power-sipping SD card, that lasts longer with a higher capacity battery. Far better experience that streaming on a flaky connection on a device that is dead in hours.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc