Hi-MD

Hi-MD stretched the format to its limit: new discs held 1 GB, and an ordinary 80-minute MD could be reformatted to a little over 300 MB. More importantly, the disc finally behaved like a real storage device — you could drag arbitrary files to it over USB, not just feed it songs. Audio could be recorded in linear PCM without ATRAC compression.

It was a technically lovely upgrade that arrived in the wrong year. By 2004 flash memory and the iPod had already settled the contest for portable audio, and a spinning magneto-optical disc — however elegant — belonged to an era on the way out. Hi-MD became the format's handsome but futile farewell.