ATRAC CD

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

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

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

• Walkman
• SonicStage
• ATRAC
• OpenMG
• Hi-MD