Thrutch

Hi all, I've just purchased my first MP3 player a Sony NW-A608, or should that be my first solid state Atrac player (upgraded from Minidisc)? Anyway, while I think the product is fantastic I find the documentation for the Connect Player software to be severely lacking, especially for a novice encoder like myself. I am just beginning to understand the difference between Atrac, Atrac3Plus, MP3 etc. I have been encoding the same song into different formats and bit rates. I have to say I could not tell any difference between Atrac3Plus 48 and 128, So that will be 50,000 songs on the player then ! So to my question. When you select a track to rip from CD onto the computer and right click on it a popup menu appears with 3 Rip options 'Rip','Quick Rip - Atrac','Quick Rip - MP3'. If you select 'Rip' the song is always encoded with the codec and bit rate selected in the 'Tools->Preferences->Cd Ripping' menu. If you select 'Quick Rip - Atrac' different things seem to happen. If the selected codec in the 'Tools->Preferences->Cd Ripping' menu is 'ATRAC3Plus' then 'Quick Rip - Atrac' encode to the setting in this menu. So in this instance 'Rip' and 'Quick Rip - Atrac' do the same thing. If you change the codec in the 'Tools->Preferences->Cd Ripping' menu to any other codec then the 'Rip' option rips to the selected codec and bit rate but selecting 'Quick Rip - Atrac' always seems to encode to ATRAC3Plus at 64kbps. I suppose what I am asking is "What is the point of Quick Rip if it encodes to such a low bit rate". I am missing something, doing something wrong or is ATRAC3Plus 64kbps a default standard ?