maeve oh

Hi, this is my first post here. I'm a music student in college, and I bought last week my first minidisc player to make recordings for summer program applications. I've used minidiscs before and thought I understood how they work, but I guess not. I bought a MZ-N707 NetMD recorder off of eBay. Which I think might have been a bad choice but maybe you will all have insight on this and can help me. First off, it takes an extraordinary amount of time to save anything. I recorded myself (hit record, pressed stop) for 30 seconds, and it took literally more than an hour (closer to 1.5) to save. Second, playback on the minidisc of said saved material stopped at 8 seconds. It wasn't working well on the player itself, so I plugged it in via USB to SonicStage and tried to play it back there. It gets to about 11/13 seconds of the way of the 32 second recording, usually jams, plays back skipping sound which eventually ends up going silent for the remainder of the time. In SonicStage, the little icon next to the track is half gray if that is of any indication. Third: I tried to record myself for longer periods of time...try 4 minutes. I hit the record button, start playing, come back to turn it off and it is already powered off and hasn't saved any data. This weekend has been very frustrating and any help anyone could offer would be so helpful...so that I don't just give up and use my computer. Thanks so much, Maeve