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[Lemurnator]

What's the difference between atrac3 and atrac3 PLUS?

What do you prefer to rip your music as? atrac3+ or atrac3, or MP3? Is atrac a recommended way to compress audio or do you prefer OGG or MP3?

 

[fart]

atrac is the sony compressor for use with minidiscs. it's completely useless outside of a minidisc. iirc it's optimized somehow for MD media.

use mp3, ogg or flac (lossless) for general purpose compression

 

[Lemurnator]

My Sony MP3 cd player came with a program that rips CDs into atrac format....

Where can I download a flac program that will rip my cds into Flac format?

Will audio in flac format work in an mp3 cd player? Are there special portable flac players?

 

[fart]

ok i've got it. your mp3 cd player is basically a minidisc player with a different laser assembly and no encoding functionality. sony wants you to transcode your mp3s into atrac or rip CDs directly into atrac which will then be burned onto a cd that you can play in your walkman, so do that. my guess is the difference between atrac3+ and atrac is compression ratio ie how many songs you can fit in a disc vs sound quality. if that's the case, 3+ will fit less songs on a disc but they will sound marginally better whereas 3 will do the opposite

 

[aaaaa0]

Without a doubt, ATRAC is inferior to MP3 (for ubiquity), WMAPro/Lossless (for quality), Ogg (openness/quality), or practically any of the other common audio formats.

Why rip your music into a format that you will never be able to take to a player that's not a Sony?

 

[Lemurnator]

Because it's all I have.

It plays MP3 cds too. But I don't have a good program that allows me to do that.

At least not a program that makes it as easy.

I want a way rip all of my music, which is a substantial amount and growing, and put it all onto one portable player in whatever sound format that sounds as close to perfect as possible and still be able to fit hundreds upon hundreds of songs on it.

Currently, I'm limited to making an atrac/mp3 cd for every band/artist. I have their entire discography on one disk, but I still have to carry around a case full of these CDs (which I can't play on anything but my portable CD player). I'm considering buying a harddrive player like an iPod but I'm really not sure if an iPod or similar product would do what I want it to do. Preferrably hold hundreds/thousands of songs, completely lossles.

I want a player that gives me both quality AND quantity.

 

[fart]

the rio karma plays FLACs, which are lossless. it does this thing where it crashes and the drive dies, so buy an extended warranty.

you can definitely hold less lossless files though. figure 2:1 for the average lossless codec so you'll get ~3hrs/gb or 60hrs on a 20gb player, etc. you also take a hit on battery life. you'll have to dig into a user community to find out exactly how much of a hit though.