ATRAC: Difference between revisions

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ATRAC (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding) is an audio compression algorithm used to store information on Minidiscs and other Sony-branded audio players. First developed by Sony in 1991; the higher mincompression flavors of ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus followed in 2000 and 2003, respectively. It uses quadrature mirror filters and modified discrete cosine transform to represent encoded audio.
ATRAC (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding) is a proprietary audio compression technology developed by Sony for usage in their MiniDisc line of digital audio players. It actually relates to three different audio compression compression technologies related among themselves, but with incompatibilities. It uses quadrature mirror filters and modified discrete cosine transform to represent encoded audio.


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ATRAC (also called ATRAC1) was developed in 1991, and used in the first MiniDisc players in the early nineties. It used bitrates of 292kbps for stereo audio and 146 for mono. Several subversions were released, from 1 to 4.5, and all of them are backwards and forwards compatible. It's reported that it only started sounding good after version 3.
 
ATRAC3 was released by Sony in 2000. It offers much better performance than ATRAC1, with reasonable quality at 132kbps. It's not backwards compatible with ATRAC1.
 
ATRAC3 was used as default audio codec for mid-high bitrates in Real Audio 8. Since Real Audio 10, the default codec is [[AAC]]. It is also being used at Sony's [http://musicstore.connect.com/ Connect] music store.
 
In 2003, Sony released ATRAC3plus, the third backwards-incompatible revision of their codec. They promise to deliver transparency at 48kbps with this new codec (of course, that's absurd).
 
==Links==
 
[http://www.minidisc.org/ Minidisc.org] - Resources and forums about MiniDisc and ATRAC
 
[http://www.sony.net/Products/ATRAC3/ ATRAC3] official website at Sony.net

Revision as of 21:07, 8 April 2005

ATRAC (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding) is a proprietary audio compression technology developed by Sony for usage in their MiniDisc line of digital audio players. It actually relates to three different audio compression compression technologies related among themselves, but with incompatibilities. It uses quadrature mirror filters and modified discrete cosine transform to represent encoded audio.

ATRAC (also called ATRAC1) was developed in 1991, and used in the first MiniDisc players in the early nineties. It used bitrates of 292kbps for stereo audio and 146 for mono. Several subversions were released, from 1 to 4.5, and all of them are backwards and forwards compatible. It's reported that it only started sounding good after version 3.

ATRAC3 was released by Sony in 2000. It offers much better performance than ATRAC1, with reasonable quality at 132kbps. It's not backwards compatible with ATRAC1.

ATRAC3 was used as default audio codec for mid-high bitrates in Real Audio 8. Since Real Audio 10, the default codec is AAC. It is also being used at Sony's Connect music store.

In 2003, Sony released ATRAC3plus, the third backwards-incompatible revision of their codec. They promise to deliver transparency at 48kbps with this new codec (of course, that's absurd).

Links

Minidisc.org - Resources and forums about MiniDisc and ATRAC

ATRAC3 official website at Sony.net