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ATRAC3 and MP3's

ed21x

ed21x

Diamond Member
yeah, i was looking up the specs to Sony's new clie n70 and they said that the mp3 player supports ATRAC and mp3. Now i know ATRAC is used by MD players, but i've never had experience with it, so can someone please explain to me what the difference is in sound quality, comnpression, etc. between ATRAC and mp3?

🙂
 
At equal compression rates Atrac3 has better sound quality, marginally. Minidisc players use a whopping ~300Kbps compression rate so they have *very* good sound quality and are excelent devices over all. On the Clie I know there are things that can convert MP3's to Atrac3 but I dunno about the other way around. ATRAC3 is sorta like sun workstation vs PC workstation (If that flew over your head, it means propriety yet powerful vs cheap and flexible and not quite as powerful) but i'm not sure of the exact implementation on the Clie.
 
Quality is fairly similar, though I would prefer ATRAC all things considered equal. However I think you should use MP3 until you can find out for sure that using ATRAC won't slip some kind of copy protection onto the files. Since Sony's record label is forcing copy protection on CDs, you know they don't care about consumers' rights much, so I would read through the manual thoroughly and/or some trial and error to see if using ATRAC on a Clie won't "protect" your files from yourself 😀

edit- FishTankX is correct that most MD players use the default compression at 292Kbps, but fairly recent models allow recording with heavier compression that results in ~132Kbps and ~62Kbps (dubbed MDLP or MiniDisc Long Play). The second compression level sounds similar to MP3 at 160-192Kbps (IMO) and the last compression sounds similar to MP3 at 80-96Kbps (again, IMO).
 
Yep, I own an MD player myself, and mines was the first one to have MDLP. The proud owner of an MZR-900, bought it a year ago... been nice to me ever since.

MDLP is a big sacrafice in quality, LP2 is reasonsable but LP4 is pushing it. If you wanted a nice minidisc player the MZR-N1 will allow you transfer MP3's to your Minidisc player at realtivley quick rates (But I don't like the program because it compresses in LP2 first which is 132KBPS... d'oh!!). I think I would take MP3 just for convenience and because it's an open standard and you can probably get MP3's offa an industry standard Flash card so it's less of a hassle to get music because most Mp3 players use the same format. Doens't the Clie support flash? Like SD flash or something. If so, you can just transfer some MP3's over from your friends MP3 players and be rockin in no time.


Ofcourse, this is considered border line illegal and would upset sony so I wouldn't reccomend you take it too far and get a 1GB flash card and carry around your Mp3 collection...

MP3 playback also kills battery life. Check how long the Clie will playback MP3's. Guarantee it won't be over 20 hours even with the screen turned off.

For casual listening though, you should be fine. I wouldn't let a Clie replace your Mp3 player though...
 
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