hpmoon

Thanks for the balanced response, though I continue to think that ATRAC has always stayed at the top of the game for balancing sonic fidelity with versatility and development. And as for going from ATRAC Lossless to WAV and then MP3, I'm not willing to spend time re-apply metadata. Short and simple, Sony needs to integrate the conversion function into SonicStage ASAP -- and hopefully take from the Lossless portion of the file rather than the lossy portion.

First of all, shame on ATRACLife for phrasing this development on its front page in a way that suggests ditching ATRAC was the right choice for all of us. Many if not most of us think it was the wrong choice. For years, ATRACLife has basically not promoted ATRAC as a superior codec against MP3, WMA and others. Sony had to have been paying attention to this, together with ATRACLife's own criticisms of ATRAC. I don't know if that gives the founders of ATRACLife some sort of sinister pride, but I resent ATRACLife for not going to bat for -- well, the very thing it's named after. Second of all, the MP3 Conversion Tool that was just released to convert non-DRM-protected ATRAC files is a huge disappointment. It's always been a big gaping hole in SonicStage that the program does not natively include the elementary ability to convert from ATRAC files to MP3s or WMAs. We've had to rely on a very low-grade, buggy, crash-prone application (Hi-MD Renderer) for something that should have been integrated into SonicStage the moment that DRM was lifted from ripping CDs, etc. So, rather than integrating an MP3 conversion function into SonicStage so that our massive ATRAC libraries could be converted to MP3 on a case-by-case basis, Sony's new "tool" really does a single, mammoth and sloppy thing: It's an all-or-nothing proposition, without a GUI. You select folders with Windows Explorer names, and that's it. For many of us who are audiophiles, we ripped our CDs into the best available format, ATRAC Lossless. I've always defended this decision and I would continue to. ATRAC Lossless was a clever way to achieve maximum fidelity at home for streaming to full-blown listening rooms, while expediting the transfer process of lower-bitrate files to ATRAC portable devices. With the MP3 Conversion Tool, we are once again left with the suspicion that Sony got lazy and coded the mini-application to grab the lower-bitrate portion of the ATRAC Lossless file for conversion purposes, rather than to grab the best source available from the file, the lossless portion. If anyone can come up with definitive test results to resolve this suspicion, it would be much appreciated bymany of us. Finally, I think it was a great disservice for the whole ATRACLife community to so proactively shut down the "rumour" a few months back about the CONNECT Store closing and the ATRAC format being retired. We could have used that time to lobby Sony to (at a minimum) get the conversion tool right. Shame on all (or most) of you. Next up: Blu-Ray bites the dust. Just watch. This company is hilarious.

Disagreed. I can't believe that after all these years, all we have for conversions is a buggy giveaway program with a nasty GUI that doesn't even deal in metadata and crashes with large bitrates.

But highest on the list, I think for most people, is that SonicStage needs to facilitate conversions from ATRAC to WMA or MP3 or AAC files, to the extent that the source ATRAC files are not DRMed (e.g., ripped CDs). I continue to be shocked and pissed that Sony has stop-gapping this vital capability. As a nuance to this demand, the conversions from ATRAC Lossless files need to come from the lossless portion of each song/track file, rather than from the ATRAC3plus corollary file part which has less definition.

I'm still absolutely shocked that after so much time has passed, where DRM isn't mandatory save for Connect downloads, you still can't convert from ATRAC to anything other than WAV which has no metadata (ID3 tags, etc.). So I have this big huge ATRAC Lossless library that I want to occasionally migrate into MP3 or WMA for my cell phone and my GPS unit and my PDA and my media server...etc....etc....and the only tool available at all is Hi-MD Renderer, which crashes constantly and basically just sucks. (No offense, but let's get real, it's not a Sony-grade piece of software.) WE COULD BE LEFT IN THE DUST WITH NO ABILITY TO CONVERT OUR ATRAC LIBRARIES TO ANYTHING ELSE. This would be a travesty. And converting to WAV files is no option, period, end of story.

I'm sure you can agree that Gracenote is woefully inadequate as a repository for album art. More than half of my CDs (many classical and opera, and I'm not a pop music fan) don't pull album art, and I end up copying and pasting from Amazon.

Problem is, the app is buggy, sluggish and doesn't deal well with certain ATRAC formats like Lossless. Now that Sony has removed DRM from most ATRAC files (e.g., those you burn from your own CDs), I'm shocked that there's no good converter yet.

You raise an interesting point, the Clie TH55 had an interesting power management scheme where there were separate dedicated video/audio processors that ended up saving a ton of operating time on the internal lithium batteries. I wonder if Sony plans to resurrect that approach.

Personally, my Sony Video Walkman is just about half a decade old: It's my Sony Clie TH-55 (PalmOS) with a 2gb memory stick and a 480x320 TFT LCD screen. Using Kinoma Player 4 EX, I've been automatically dumping BeyondTV PVR conversions (natively in the BeyondTV software) into the Clie for mobile viewing. The funny thing about this "drama" is that we're talking about dinosaur technology.

But you ignored his point, which outlined a specific, decided, deliberate scenario where the computer is a playback machine into a high-quality audio system (qua lossless codec) and lower-fi transfers onto portable devices is an added bonus. This is an ideal scenario for many of us, regardless of your critique. The killer app would be the provision, via either SonicStage or some third-party developer, of a conversion tool to go from ATRAC Lossless to MP3/WMA/etc. That would (hopefully) force the transfer to occur from the Lossless portion of the file.

Even better deal for $69.95 with no shipping and no tax at Amazon.com.

I'm wondering whether there's any solution to making a typical multimedia keyboard (e.g., my Wireless Optical Pro) control SonicStage. When SonicStage alone is loaded, the next and previous track keyboard buttons do the right thing, and stop will stop SonicStage, but the Pause/Play button on the keyboard always calls up Windows Media Player and fails to affect SonicStage. I'm wishing this would work because I just got myself the whole Bluetooth Logitech system with playback controls on the wireless receiver units and wireless headphones. Same issue with the keyboard on the Bluetooth devices: next/previous and stop buttons work, but not the critical play/pause button. Logitech's Bluetooth system sends playback control commands via the A2DP Bluetooth protocol, therefore it's important for SonicStage to upgrade as A2DP continues to integrate with Windows. In short, is there some way to make the Windows XP call for Play/Pause (e.g., multimedia keyboard's play/pause button) not always call up Windows Media Player?

Very few of us have any interest in installing a Japanese font, per the instructions in this topic. As the much better alternative, install any one of the following six new ClearType fonts that will be included in the next OS: You will find the fonts here. They are English. Note that Consolas is the only non-proportional font face.

As a follow-up to this discovery on performing a batch conversion directly from ATRAC formats into WMA/MP3/etc., I've found a semi-automated way to make this work. Unfortunately, this technique is limited by your computer's processing power and memory capacity. I was successful with this procedure opening several dozens of files on a Pentium IV/3.0 GHz/2gb RAM PC. With all due respect to Hi-MD Renderer, this has become the best possible way to convert files from "My Library." 1. Open all the ATRAC files that you want to Batch Convert, from within Sound Forge 8.0d. You can do this by going to "File" then "Open...", then selecting multiple items (or all the files) in a folder. Before moving on to Step 2, you can open additional files from other folders by repeating this step. 2. There will be a delay while waiting to load the ATRAC files, due to Sound Forge's automatic peaks-building algorithm -- it will do this for each file that opens, each in its own window. Just wait for them to finish. If you don't want to deal with a bunch of .sfk files after these peaks are built, make sure that you select "Delete temporary files on close" within "Options" then "Preferences..." 3. Go to "Tools" then "Batch Converter..." and you will see all the ATRAC files you opened in the list, as demonstrated below. 4. Click the "Save" tab (see example in the picture attached to the first post in this thread). Click the "Add Save Options..." button. Select your codec (e.g., WMA, MP3, OGG, WAV, etc.) and fine-tune it as desired. When you specify the destination directory, you can "Preserve source subfolders" by checking its box. Note that you can add additional save options to this tab's list for concurrent transcoding of a single source to multiple files (e.g., OMA --> MP3 and WMA). 5. Click the "Run Job" button on the bottom right. You'll see the progress under the "Status" tab. 6. Upon completion, you can easily close all the open files/waveforms as indicated below.

So far there is no path for directly converting ATRAC files into WMA files. Many situations exist today where WMA is the only option, either because: (1) you choose a lower bitrate such as 64 kbps because of flash player space limitations, and WMA is the only game in town (vs. MP3 which is indisputably inferior at 64 kbps); or (2) WMA is the only supported file type (e.g., all Verizon mobile phones with digital music capability). Currently, the quickest way to do this is to use Hi-MD Renderer for a batch convert to MP3, retaining metadata, and then transcoding those MP3s into WMAs. Obviously, that's a lossy thing to do to already very lossy files. There's hope on the horizon, but like always, Sony almost gets us there but not quite. With the release of Sound Forge 8.0d, Sony added support for importing all kinds of ATRAC files, including ATRAC Lossless, which can then be saved to whatever format you like among Sony's impressive list of codecs -- including WMA, and even WMA Professional (though we're still waiting on access to the Holy Grail of low-bitrate codecs, WMA Professional Plus, which is what Verizon uses for delivering music over its network). Sony also added a fantastic "Batch Converter..." option (under the "Tools" menu) that can take nested folders of media files (e.g., SonicStage's "My Library"), perform operations such as conversions to WMA format (as well as additional conversions to MP3, etc. during the same pass!), and then store the converted files into separate folders that match the folder structure of the originals. But surprise, surprise -- while you can "Open..." an ATRAC file in the same application, you can batch convert every other kind of source file except ATRAC Lossless. Since Sony spilled the beans by allowing ATRAC Lossless imports anyway, its exclusion from the Batch Converter is more likely a bug, but with Sony, you never know... Anyway, please go to this link to encourage Sony to add ATRAC Lossless processing ability to the Batch Converter. With this addition, a whole new world of options will open up for ATRAC users. I personally don't have much of a problem having Sony's suite of software consist of components to tackle "pro" tasks versus. consumer tasks -- a big chunk of the criticism about SonicStage goes away when this Batch Converter gets its wings.