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Best ATRAC bitrate for Mp3s?

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fatmuttony

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I know that when importing tracks from a CD, I like the Advanced Lossless Atrac 256 Kb/s setting because it's the right trade off between space and quality.

However, I don't know what bitrate Atrac to convert my MP3s to before transferring to my RH710. THe RH710 is a 2nd gen unit, and MP3s transferred as is don't sound too good. So, for MP3s that have been encoded on 192 Kb/s, what Atrac should I convert to to get the best trade off between space and sound quality? Does this change with other bitrate MP3s (128 for example)?

Thanks in advance.

PS - Mods, if this would be better suited in the Software/SonicStage section, please move this there.

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Do not transcode directly. First use Adobe Audition to open an MP3 file as a 32-bit WAV file. Then save this file as a 16-bit WAV. Then import the resulting file into SonicStage, and encode it into ATRAC3plus. 192 kbit/s will do in most cases, but you may want to experiment with other bitrates, if 192 is not enough.

Yes, you will lose ID3 tags, but the resulting quality will be a bit better. And also you may at the same time use Adobe Audition to remove gaps from MP3s before saving them as WAVs (via "Open Append" and some manual work). In this way your ATRAC3plus albums will be gapless. AND you may try using GraceNote to get the ID3 tags back, if your MP3s were initially encoded from a commercial CD.

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I know that when importing tracks from a CD, I like the Advanced Lossless Atrac 256 Kb/s setting because it's the right trade off between space and quality.

Check me if I'm wrong but, as far as I know, the Advanced Lossless atrac bitrate isn't 256 kb/s :huh: .

cheers

Edited by dogville
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Do not transcode directly. First use Adobe Audition to open an MP3 file as a 32-bit WAV file. Then save this file as a 16-bit WAV. Then import the resulting file into SonicStage, and encode it into ATRAC3plus. 192 kbit/s will do in most cases, but you may want to experiment with other bitrates, if 192 is not enough.

Yes, you will lose ID3 tags, but the resulting quality will be a bit better. And also you may at the same time use Adobe Audition to remove gaps from MP3s before saving them as WAVs (via "Open Append" and some manual work). In this way your ATRAC3plus albums will be gapless. AND you may try using GraceNote to get the ID3 tags back, if your MP3s were initially encoded from a commercial CD.

Do you really think it makes any difference?

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Do you really think it makes any difference?

If you are not an audiophile or using high-end headphones, my recommendation is to transcode at HiSP (256) using SonicStage. I doubt very much that you will be able to tell much difference from the original. Just experiment and see what works for you - but going from reasonably encoded 192K MP3s to HiSP should yield pretty good results. Yes, I know this is not the best method for achieving the absolute ultimate sound quality - but it really depends on what kind of music it is, how you are going to listen to it (and where), etc. etc. You must also take into account the amount of time it would take to do some of the other methods described in this post - particularly for large numbers of files.

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