Advanced lossless - any good?

[Trondis]

Hi!

I have tried to use the Advanced Lossless codec twice, both times with bad results.

First attempt: I ripped a gapless CD (containing two long continous pieces split into around 50 short tracks) to advanced lossless 352 and transferred it to my HiMD minidisk player at a lower bitrate. The transferred album had gaps when I played it back.

Second attempt: I ripped a CD with one long track (60 minutes) to advanced lossless 352, and transferred it to a NW-HD1 player as Atrac 352. When I played back the file it had several (5-7) dropouts.

Now I don't know if the dropouts was caused by artefacts in the file, or if it was the players fault. But I think I will stay away from Advanced Lossless in the future.

Does anyone else have similar experiences?

[ender325_]

I'm not too knowledgeable on the subject but the only players fully compatible with AAL are the S70x series and beyond. The players before the S70x series just support the lossy part of AAL (in your case Atrac3plus 352kbps). In terms of gapless playback you may have to ask somebody else (it could be your player). I hope this reply was of any help to you.

[dura_]

the NW-HD1 doesn't support 352 kbs, so another conversion has taken place during transferring. This might well lead to gaps and reduced sound quality.

It is completely useless to apply atrac lossless if you do not have devices that support lossless playback (which takes a large amount of space, say 0.5 gb per album) and it is advisable to use kbs-rates that are supported by your device. Personally, I encode everything in ATRAC 3= 256 kbs; widely supported by sony devices and gving excellent sound quality.

[Trondis]

the NW-HD1 doesn't support 352 kbs, so another conversion has taken place during transferring.

Strange - the display on the NW-HD1 read 352. If the file had been converted I think that the display should read whatever new bitrate it was converted to.

Trondis