marcusc

I also plan to stick with atrac. The other formats just cannot complete with the quality of it. Gapless playback also a big bonus of atrac. Some albums intentionally have no gaps between tracks (eg dance mixes and live albums) and it is nice to hear the album as it was intended to be heard - with no gaps! There is nothing worse than 1 or 2 second gaps right in the middle of a smoothly mixed house or techno complication! For me, 132kbps atrac3 is far, far superior even to 192kbps MP3. So I can get a lot more albums on my walkman at a quality acceptable to me, than i could with MP3 or WMA. I am going to have to take very good care of my NW-E015 walkman, because I think it will soon be impossible to get a new atrac3 player here in the UK!!

I've since installed Service Pack 1 for Vista and this seems to have reduced the heavy disk access significantly. So now SS runs and plays music perfectly. Adding album art works fine. Takes 2-3 seconds to apply to all tracks on an album.

Hi Juli, Thanks for replying... I've come back to the PC after having left it running for a while. Vista has now stopped the heavy hard drive access that it likes to do (what on earth is Vista doing?). Now the playback of the ripped music in SS is smooth with no crackling. I'll try ripping some music in windows media player and see if the same thing happens with WMA playback when Vista is busy hammering the hard drive. hmmm.... Perhaps Vista is just too busy doing what it does to process the sound?

Hi all, I have SonicStage 4.3 CP installed on Vista Ultimate and my music is ripped to ATRAC3 132kbps. While the music sound great on my NW Walkman, the playback of the music within SonicStage sounds awful. There is a crackling sound all the way through every track. Anyone seen this problem, or know how to improve the sound in SonicStage? kind regards, Marcus

Hello, I've read that ripping CDs at 256kbps atrac3plus will give stunning sound quality. Problem is I'm not sure which setting to select in sonicstage 4.3 Does anyone know if I select ATRAC as the format and 256kbps as the bit rate, will sonicstage actually convert it to atrac3plus?

Hi jerex, "The sound is more musical, full bodied with greater depth, whereas I generally find MP3 to be a bit flat and harsh sounding at times" I'm glad that it's not just me that notices how much more enjoyable the music is with the atrac codec. I've been trying to convince myself that MP3 sounds just as good, but it just isn't as nice to listen to.

Hi all, I'm new here, but I just wanted to ask a question. Is it just me that will miss atrac3? I have a network walkman and when listening to CDs ripped straight to atrac3, the sound quality is awesome. Listening to the same track on the player in mp3 just sounds flat in comparison to atrac3. Anybody else noticed that?