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Sony SonicStage (ATRAC)
SonicStage is an audio library manager created by Sony to integrate with
their MiniDisc devices. The installation is bloated, takes forever and
installs all kinds of drivers and barely-related crap on your Windows.
Versions earlier than 3.3 mandate DRM on all tracks ripped from CD or
converted with SonicStage. The user interface is quite unintuitive (that
being said, 4.3 seemed friendlier than 2.0 in the short time I used
them).
But I did not create this page to complain about SonicStage. I am here
to talk about ATRAC, which is Sony's audio compression format, and
SonicStage just happens to be an encoder.
ATRAC - Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding - started being developed by
Sony in the early nineties as an audio data reduction technique to be
employed in their movie theater audio system - SDDS (Sony Dynamic Digital
Sound) - that encoded 7.1 audio streams in 1168kbps and stored the data
optically next to the film stock sprockets. In this capacity it competed
with the Dolby AC3 and DTS formats.
Around the same time, Sony was working on a magneto-optical media storage
system called MiniDisc that used ATRAC to compress audio, reducing CD
quality streams from 1411kbps (uncompressed) to 292kbps - or 146kbps in
mono mode. There are several backwards- and forwards-compatible versions
of the ATRAC encoder created by Sony, from v1 to v4.5 (and then, Type R
and Type S), and it is said it only started sounding good in version 3.
Other MiniDisc manufacturers like Panasonic and Sharp also released their
own tuned versions of the encoder.
In 1999 Sony launched the first major upgrade to the ATRAC format with
the release of ATRAC3. It was introduced as a response to the perceived
technological superiority of the MP3 format (similar quality at much
smaller bitrates), so ATRAC3 claims to achieve transparency in LP2 mode
at 132kbps. There is also an LP4 mode that stores tracks in 66kbps but
with noticeable quality degradation. While being based on ATRAC, it is
not backwards compatible as it includes several coding improvements and
modified algorithms - therefore it will not work with original MiniDisc
players, only with newer MDLP (MiniDisc Long Play) devices.
The next upgrade of the format is called ATRAC3plus and was launched in
2003, still based on the same underlying technologies but with further
backwards-incompatible improvements. It offers bitrates ranging from 48
to 352kbps and is only compatible with Hi-MD MiniDisc devices (but also
compatible with several other Sony devices such as VAIO cell phones, PS3
and PSP gaming consoles, and Xplod car players).
A parallel iteration of the format is ATRAC Advanced Lossless, in which
an audio stream is encoded in ATRAC3 or ATRAC3plus and the "discarded"
audio data is losslessly compressed and merged to the lossy stream. That
way, players that understand the extra data can play lossless audio,
and older players that do not can play the normal lossy stream. It is
the same idea implemented by mp3HD, WavPack hybrid mode and OptimFrog DualStream.
Compression performance is quite bad, yielding ratios similar to Dakx.
The latest iteration of the format is called ATRAC9, with a focus on
video game audio for Sony consoles.
Besides being implemented in several hardware devices and software
programs created by Sony, the format has been licensed to other MiniDisc
manufacturers such as Kenwood, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sanyo, Sharp, etc.;
to Real Networks as the audio compression engine in Real Audio 8; and to Liquid Audio as a format
option in their platform.
In addition to SonicStage, here you'll find a collection of command line
ATRAC3plus and ATRAC9 encoders and decoders extracted from various Sony
video game SDKs. They all produce weird RIFF-wrapped ATRAC streams, but
with different capabilities. For instance, tools for portable devices
(PSP and PS Vita) do not support multichannel audio. The PS3 tool only
supports 48kHz streams, while the PSP one only suports 44.1kHz streams,
and the PS4 and PS Vita tools seem to support all major frequencies. PS3
and PSP tools only support ATRAC3plus while PS4 and PS Vita only support
ATRAC9. And it seems none of them support ATRAC Advanced Lossless...
You can also try the Sony ATRAC3 ACM codec, available below. It integrates
with the Windows Audio Compression Manager and
encodes to ATRAC3 files wrapped in the WAV container, allowing bitrates
of 66, 105 and 132kbps. Keep in mind this is quite old code and probably
does not reflect the best quality ATRAC3 can offer.
And if you're still using Winamp, feel free to grab the in_atrac3 plugin
below, developed by Daijoubu. The interface seems to be in Japanese and
it is quite confusing. It will only work with OpenMG (*.oma) unprotected
ATRAC3 or ATRAC3plus files - like the ones encoded by SonicStage. It can
also work with *.aa3 files (as encoded by, E.G, Sound Forge + its plugin
below), but you will first have to rename the extension to .oma. I could
not get it to work with the PS3 or PSP encoding tools.
None of the ATRAC versions and iterations has ever been standardized or
publicly documented, which in part explains the small popularity the
format enjoys outside the Sony world. There is no VBR encoding at all
and while there are multichannel capabilities in ATRAC3plus and ATRAC9,
it is quite hard to find encoders and decoders that support them. But
the FFMPEG project reverse engineered, and provides decoders for, all
iterations of ATRAC in their libavcodec library.
Since the early 2010s Sony appears to be de-emphasizing the use of ATRAC,
at least for end-users. Versions of SonicStage - now renamed to "Music
Center" - released since that time do not offer the format as an option
for ripping CDs, the only choices are MP3, AAC, WAV, and FLAC. And the
latest version of Music Center goes as far as introducing functionality
that can automatically
convert all ATRAC songs it finds in the user's library to AAC or
FLAC.
The official ATRAC home page at Sony's web site is still available here (it
has not been updated since 2008) and you can see a mirror of the SDDS
website at the
Internet Archive.
ATRAC lossless compression performance in my limited test: 62,27%
(using ATRAC3 132kbps base)
Date: 2007-02-05
Version: 4.3
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: SS43E.exe - 36.969kB
Date: 2004-03-09
Version: 2.0
Interface: Graphical
Platform: Win32
Download: SS20E.exe - 37.485kB
Date: 2010-05-13
Version: 3.1
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: PS3_at3tool.zip - 288kB
Date: 2009-08-18
Version: 3.0
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: PSP_at3tool.zip - 256kB
Date: 2016-01-19
Version: 3.5.0.2
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win64
Download: PS4_at9tool.zip - 76kB
Date: 2012-01-11
Version: 1.6
Interface: Command line
Platform: Win32
Download: PSV_at9tool.zip - 83kB
Date: 2001-01-12
Version: 0.98
Interface: ACM Codec
Platform: Win32
Download: Atrac3.exe - 148kB
Date: 2006-02-13
Version: 1.0.109
Interface: SoundForge 6+ plugin
Platform: Win32
Download: atracplug.zip - 679kB
Date: 2011-10-18
Version: 1.0
Interface: Winamp plugin
Platform: Win32
Download: in_atrac3.zip - 256kB
Kindly contributed by Zachary Jelesoff.
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