That UK H/W MD transfer editor looks very nice but first you have to find and buy a MD data drive. These used to cost the earth and aren't made any more, as far as I know. I wonder how old that site is? Maybe you can pick up a used one on ebay...

The Xitel product gets round the bi-directional problem by digitizing the headphone output of the MD, so it's just like using a sound card except perhaps the A-D conversion is less noisy because it is outside of the PC box.

I notice the Terratec Aureon 5.1 "Fun" card will take S/PDIF optical (TosLink) input from a MD deck and it's a cheap sound card. I still think this is the best way to go. If you have a CD player with digital output you can also transfer your CDs to WAV files, with zero quality loss.

Anahata