[mightymouse]

I've been wanting to talk aobut this for a long time, but I don't understand why peopel are so keen on dissing Sony's choice to use a proprietary format for their mp3.

Apple does the same thing, but with aac files- and its just as inconvenient. if your whole library is in .wav files, you have to wait an extra DAY to get your music transfered to an ipod.

Sony's atrac3 is just as good as the aac too- it compresses your file but maintains the same sound quality. I just don't understnad why people hate sony but not apple because of that. infact, the only reason why i bought a zen micro is because it just used wmp10 to transfer my wav files, plain and simple.

apple also forces u to use one computer's library, and you can't transfer back from you ipod... i find that selfish and greedy on the part of apple, whatever reasons they may have. everyone else doesn't do that, why do they have to distinguish themselves from others? (sure, the whole esthetics thing, but please, spare me some of that discussion) lol.

 

[daphox]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mightymouse Apple does the same thing, but with aac files- and its just as inconvenient.

No. It's not the same thing.
Quote:

Originally Posted by mightymouse Sony's atrac3 is just as good as the aac too- it compresses your file but maintains the same sound quality.

If you say so....

 

[DigDub]

for portable use, i guess atrac3 is ok.

 

[Oliver :)]

Ahhhh, I never thought the day would come when I would actually have to take use of the IGNORE feature of this forum. Jammering about a company's "greed" and then admitting to using MS technologie out of free will is just a touch too much. Bye mightymouse, see you in five years or so.

 

[nismo96]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oliver Ahhhh, I never thought the day would come when I would actually have to take use of the IGNORE feature of this forum. Jammering about a company's "greed" and then admitting to using MS technologie out of free will is just a touch too much. Bye mightymouse, see you in five years or so.

He's on your ignore list for that? Wow.

Anyway, I have to agree that ATRAC3/ATRAC3Plus is great for portable use. It's gapless as opposed to MP3 and AAC, it also sounds good to my ears. I think that the Sony bashing starts as soon as someone brings up their positive opinions of their products. It's a shame really.

 

[Oliver :)]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nismo96 He's on your ignore list for that? Wow.

All the pointless iPod & Apple bashers that ooze "I'm thirteen" from their posts will go that way. I'm sick of it.

Regarding ATRAC, I was always puzzled about V3, since in my MD days (aeons ago) SONY was already up with version 4

ATRAC is not a bad codec at all, it just can't compete with lossless, and SONY missed the bus in the convenience sector. I would really wish for them to return to their former class.

 

[AlienPyro]

mightymouse, the ipod does support wav, on top of a slew of other audio codecs. People were just angry at Sony for their exclusion of all codecs that were not atrac - until recently, of course.
Just pointing out taht there would be no need to transcode a wav library to aac just for the iPod.

But yeah, the Micro's cool

 

[myself, aka me]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oliver All the pointless iPod & Apple bashers that ooze "I'm thirteen" from their posts will go that way. I'm sick of it. Regarding ATRAC, I was always puzzled about V3, since in my MD days (aeons ago) SONY was already up with version 4 ATRAC is not a bad codec at all, it just can't compete with lossless, and SONY missed the bus in the convenience sector. I would really wish for them to return to their former class.

ATRAC Type R, ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus are different things.

Read ATRAC Type R as ATRAC1 Type R.

On a HiMD that would be HiSP vs. SP. Some people say SP is better but I doubt i could tell the difference, the bitrate is 256K for HiSP and 292K for SP.

 

[DigDub]

Quote:

Originally Posted by myself, aka me ATRAC Type R, ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus are different things. Read ATRAC Type R as ATRAC1 Type R. On a HiMD that would be HiSP vs. SP. Some people say SP is better but I doubt i could tell the difference, the bitrate is 256K for HiSP and 292K for SP.

ya. atrac3 was invented by sony to somehow confuse the general public with mp3. atrac SP is the best. some audiophiles cannot distinguish it from CDs.

 

[Michael1980]

Nothing beats good old SP from optical source! (or a 5x bookshelf).

 

[PodMan]

in my experience, it depends on the atrac encoder. Atrac1 SP has many different versions. the SP on my sharp sd-nx10 bookshelf system does not sound that great. Type R seems to be the ultimate SP version as I don't think they will be updating it any further. Even Type S was just type-R plus a new playback decoder.

Atrac3+ 64kbps (Hi-LP) actually sounds surprisingly good for its bitrate. It sounds very noticably better than Atrac3 66kbps (LP4) which seemed to have been optimized for recording voice. Everything sounded mono and the high freq rolloff was extreme (probably at like 12-14khz) on LP4 but Hi-LP certainly sounds much better for its bitrate with noticeably better stereo separation and high frequencies.

for going on long trips, the best option to me continues to be just to have a low-end hi-md recorder (like the nh600d) loaded with a few 1gb discs of hi-lp songs and a pack of AA batteries. that ought to last a few months. and combining it with the shure e2 (which also rolls off high freq) and putting the player on "unique" mode provides a pretty full sound (although unrefined, but its 64kbps) that cancels out background noise

.

 

[jerb]

Quote:

apple also forces u to use one computer's library, and you can't transfer back from you ipod... i find that selfish and greedy on the part of apple, whatever reasons they may have. everyone else doesn't do that, why do they have to distinguish themselves from others? (sure, the whole esthetics thing, but please, spare me some of that discussion) lol.

have you ever heard of this little group called the RIAA? they really dont like it when people download or pirate music, in fact they've sued 12 year olds to prove their point. this is why apple does this, its just another way to cover their @ss.

cheers

 

[blessingx]

As others have mentioned, AAC and ATRAC aren't alike as mentioned. WMA is much closer, but all three tried to improve on MP3. And to their credit they succeeded. Sony should get props for introducing a superior codec (as should Apple, not for creating their own, but pushing the hidden AAC forward).

It's just MP3 has improved (though most obviously LAME) since also.

Please keep in mind none of these codecs are brand new (though WMA is by far the most recent).

 

[TomRemixed]

as an owner of a sony MD player I will say this.

ATRAC3 IS FRIGGIN ANNOYING!!!

It takes way to long to transfer things or convet them plus it doesn't let you read a bunch of files. The sound quality isn't good. It can sound like a low end frequency radio station due to inproper converting which happens a lot to me. Plus most cd docks can play them on a disk.
Sony is trying to make everyone convert to a stupid system and no one is listening thank god.
LP4 isn't good sounding at all LP2(HI-LP) to me sounds just like MP3.
Ok I'm done ranting.

 

[AdamWill]

it's not the same as Apple at all. Apple players can play MP3 files, and non-DRM AAC files created with any AAC encoder. If the Sony players played MP3 - as they do now, but never used to - there wouldn't be a problem, as you could just bypass ATRAC3. The *problem* was that there was *no other way* you could listen to music on the Sony players. If you have MP3s without the original source, for whatever reason, you had to transcode them to ATRAC3 to play, which was pointless, slow, and inevitably reduced quality. The sync and encode software was ugly, unusable, slow and cumbersome. The format itself was never the problem, the problem was that the player would play no other format and you had no way to encode to that format except with Sony's software. Just too much lock-in. Now Sony players can handle MP3, it's fine.