Help with Atrac

[Unregistered]

Hi all,
I'm desperately hoping that some of you guys might be able to give me some advice/help. I uploaded quite a lot of my cd collection to my home pc and burnt them to Atrac CD's for my sony CD player. Along with this I also had some really cool stuff that I have downloaded\borrowed etc down through the years. The hard drive on my home pc recently died on me, so I've lost my library. I still have them on CD, but is there any way of ripping the CD's back to mp3, wma or wav?
Any help on this would be most greatly appreciated.

[xoas]

Re: Help with Atrac

If you still have your Sony CD player and it has a line out jack for speakers and you have a stereo line input for your sound card (which most newer computers have nowadays), the simplest (conceptually) but most time consuming method would be to hook up your Sony Atrac cd player to the computer with a stereo cord from the cd player's speaker jack to the line input of your computer and recording from your cd player to dMC (dBpowerAMP Music Converter) using Auxilary Input.
Slightly less tedious but probably not by much would be to use SonicStage 2.0, reportedly available from here:

"As of July 5, 2004 here for Win98SE, ME, 2000:

http://cdda-sonicstage.connect.com/...geInstaller.exe

and here for WinXP:
http://sonicstage.connect.com/SonicStageInstaller.exe. "

I have not used this program. It appears to be able to allow you to play Atrac files but I think you may have to do so through Windows Media Player or RealOne Player. I am not sure whether you will be able to convert those files as they may continue to be in Atrac format. The question would be whether you could further convert them to mp3. The problem being that Atrac was designed to make it nearly impossible to copy Atrac files. It may be that the best you can do is to play the Atrac files on your cd through WMP and record them to wav or mp3 using dMC Auxilary input which is as tedious as doing it through the first method.
You may want to check to see if you still have the program you used to convert your files to Atrac to see if it will allow you to to play or convert your Atrac files.
Finally, you may want to scan the admittedly lengthy thread here:

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=2377

which has more fact, opinion and passionate discourse about Atrac than I could ever hope to provide.
If I have misrepresented any of the information above, or if one of the Atrac community has a better suggestion, please feel free to help out.
Best wishes,
Bill Mikkelsen

[xoas]

Re: Help with Atrac

Another idea-
Have you considered trying to find someone who could help rescure your files from your old hard drive? It might, for all I know, be prohibitively expensive but it might not be. If you were willing to invest in this it would save you a whole lot of time (assuming you have any great number of Atrac cds).

Best wishes,
Bill Mikkelsen

[drspy00]

Re: Help with Atrac

This may sound stupid but what is Atrac?

[xoas]

Re: Help with Atrac

Briefly stated, Atrac is a file format used principly, if not almost solely, by Sony for use on their mini-disc players and portable mp3 players. Apparently many users feel that Atrac gives better results than mp3 or wma at higher compression rates. The downside is that Atrac files have rather extensive copy-protection builtin and outside of Sony products you can't find many other places you can use/play your Atrac files.
Atrac has been updated to Atrac3 and Atrac3 Plus. For way more information and opinion on Atrac3 and 3 Plus see the following thread:

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=2377

I have never used Atrac in any form and I would not recommend using it unless you have a Sony player that requires Atrac and then I would make sure that my files were saved/backed up in some other format (like mp3, ogg, even-shudder-wma) so that you will still be able to access those files outside of your Sony player.

Best wishes,
Bill Mikkelsen

[drspy00]

Re: Help with Atrac

Thanks for your help. It sounds like a strange format. I hate things that are restricting like copy protection.