An ATRAC CD is a compressed audio optical disc containing compressed digital audio in the ATRAC3 or ATRAC3plus formats, which are part of Sony's ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) family of proprietary audio compression algorithms.

A Sony car stereo capable of playing ATRAC CDs

Description

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ATRAC CD was used with SonicStage Simple Burner software (Ver.1.0 / 1.1) in February 2003,[1][2] and was subsequently replaced with SonicStage in 2004. The new CD Walkman product was called "ATRAC CD Walkman". In the following year (2004-2005), ATRAC CD boombox was introduced, as a new product.

ATRAC Technology[3]
CD (Linear PCM) ATRAC[4] ATRAC3 ATRAC3plus
Bitrate 1411kbit/s 292kbit/s 132kbit/s 64kbit/s
Data size (One 4 minute track) 42.33MB 8.77MB 3.97MB 1.94MB
Number of Tracks Recorded into CD-R (700 MB) About 16 tracks About 79 tracks About 176 tracks About 360 tracks

Software for burning ATRAC CD

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The difference of ATRAC3plus/ATRAC3 and MP3 file structure[5]

The ATRAC CD can be burned with SonicStage Simple Burner Ver.1.1, SonicStage 2.x to 3.x and SonicStage CP. This software is able to create a disk image from MP3 files and compact discs and can be burned with the included CD-R/RW drive on a computer.

Storage Comparison of ATRAC CD on a regular CD-R
Format Bitrate Songs (Estimated at 4 minutes / song)
ATRAC3plus 48kbit/s 490 Songs[4]
ATRAC3plus 64kbit/s 360 Songs
ATRAC3 66kbit/s 350 Songs
ATRAC3 105kbit/s 220 Songs
ATRAC3 132kbit/s 170 Songs
ATRAC3plus 256kbit/s 90 Songs

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Quick Reference Guide - SONY USA
  2. ^ SONY D-NE1 Catalog
  3. ^ "Sony Global - ATRAC - Overview". www.sony.net. Retrieved 2020-07-18.
  4. ^ a b "ATRAC" here refers to the SP mode used in the MD format.
  5. ^ "SONY D-NE10" (PDF). Retrieved 2021-04-24.
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