ATRAC CD's

[sfbp]

What a great idea is the Atrac CD. 700MB of compressed music, suitable for your car. Between 6 and 8 full length albums (or more if you are really stingy with tbe bitrate, I am talking 256kbps here). But they won't play on a PC, unless you are one of those addicts who hooked up his Car headunit like a drive in a PC (yes, it has the right power supplies). You can only see what is on them with the greatest of difficulty and no home unit will play them (though a number of portable CD players are built with ATRAC CD support).

Here's the funny part: the disk can be copied. Using Nero I had absolutely no trouble in reproducing an Atrac CD. That's 8 albums in 3 minutes, folks!

Perhaps Sony worked out that if everyone actually acquired one of the CD players, that piracy would become rife, as you can now duplicate music about 8-10 times as fast as by copying CDs?

Stephen

[KJ_Palmer]

I've got a number of Sony ATRAC-CD capable portables, though, besides a few ATRAC-CD's I made early on - more to test Sonicstage could actually make them, I havent really succumbed to the charm of the ATRAC-CD. For compressed CDs I decided to go with the MP3-CD rather tie myself down to more of Sony's propriety nonsense.

At least I can play my MP3-CDs on virtually any CD player made in the last 5 years, apart from the ultra hi-fi decks. For better fidelity I can always play the original CD. Shame in a way as ATRAC has arguably better quality than MP3, however I'd rather not limit myself too much.

It's different with MD/Hi-MD of course as you're locked into the format from the start.

Perhaps ATRAC-CDs are copiable because they're so niche and hence not a threat to the music industry that Sony either forgot or didn't bother to copy-protect the discs. Maybe, anyway just a few thoughts.

[sfbp]

Interesting to hear the confessions of a fellow-sufferer. I actually am underwhelmed by any of the portables that I have (but I admit I got them second hand to makes sure I had just made a valid disk rather than because I want to listen on them) especially using the line out. I suppose if someone could rig a digi-out that might be interesting.

But I'm sure noone will ever nick one of my ATRACs lying in the car

Yes as you say, it's one way to get Atrac3+ in the car - and very good it is.

[KJ_Palmer]

The Sony D-NE900 actually does have a digital out, Stephen. Not sure if it works with ATRAC (or MP3) discs (other equipment I have disables digital outputs for non CD-Audio discs, for some reason), but the manual doesn't inidicate either way so perhaps that's OK. Definitely (potentially) one way of feeding pure ATRAC 3+ into a stereo system...!

[ozpeter]

I don't think there's any difference in principle in duplicating an atrac cd vs duplicating an mp3 cd. It's all just data.

[sfbp]

The Sony D-NE900 actually does have a digital out, Stephen. Not sure if it works with ATRAC (or MP3) discs (other equipment I have disables digital outputs for non CD-Audio discs, for some reason), but the manual doesn't inidicate either way so perhaps that's OK. Definitely (potentially) one way of feeding pure ATRAC 3+ into a stereo system...!

Cmon, I want to hear about this. Get tinkering.......!

Sony and Onkyo carefully disabled digital out on all known Atrac3+-capable devices (I dunno about Playstation but I think their NAC HD server doesnt read Atrac CD). So I'd be surprised. (added: see p.32 of the manual, as we suspected).

My current solution to the mess is playback on the HTPC's USB out into the Xitel MDport DG2, and this seems to get around the problems I had with HDMI-transported sound to my amplifier (I won't bore you since they are probably only MY problems). This allows me to play back my NH900 (or any HiMD) into the amplifier without uploading anything.

Meanwhile it seems that over on linux-minidisc someone there finally cracked the on-disk encryption of HiMD files.

I don't think there's any difference in principle in duplicating an atrac cd vs duplicating an mp3 cd. It's all just data.

Yeah, it just makes their efforts to obfuscate and "prevent piracy" seem silly.

Perhaps it's more along the lines of "we did our absolute best to make this format unreadable by pirates, so we can't get sued"????

[KJ_Palmer]

Well, as suspected the D-NE900 doesn't output a digital signal for MP3 or ATRAC files. Can't imagine why - surely no one would bother digitally copying compressed files in real time. Would be handy as a digital feed into a hi-fi system for playback purposes. At least the line out can be used for that, so (to me) it's no big problem really.