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Music Companies Bemoan New High-Cap Portables

Posted by timothy on from the that's-a-lot-of-lake-woebegone-days dept.

An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist reports: 'The music industry this week condemned the launch of two recording systems that will let people copy between 30 and 100 hours of music onto a single disc.'" The Sony system is supposed to use "ultra-efficient data compression system used in MiniDiscs" to fit "30 hours of MP3 music" on a CD-R. (I thought MD used ATRAC rather than MP3, and that ATRAC's standard bitrate was 285.3 Kbps -- can some MD gurus bring us up to speed?) Philips' system skips CDs, and instead uses a DVD burner, with the resulting disks playable in a to-be-released portable player. I wonder what kind of DRM features the companies will use to cripple each system.

2 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. ATRAC3 by bigethespe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Minidiscs do use Atrac3 but the newer MD players have adjusted the atrac encoding format (called MDLP) to allow for longer play times with marginal quality losses. try minidisco for a great resource and more info.

  2. Sony's encoding by subsonic · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm a big user of minidiscs, however I'm not a profesed "guru", but here's what I understand of ATRAC and MD:

    Sony is currently using ATRAC3. It is capable of encoding up to 320 minutes of stereo audio at a bitrate of 36kbps.
    To quote from minidisc.org: "[ATRAC3]differs substantially from the original, existing ATRAC system, having twice the transform window size (1024 samples [23.2ms], vs. 512 samples [11.6ms]), encoding tone components separately from other spectra, splitting the input signal into 4 bands instead of 3, and using Huffman coding on the final bit stream to squeeze out redundancy." However, Sony has probably gone to a new version of ATRAC3 for this new application of writing to CDs.
    Sony has basically scrapped the idea of using minidiscs as a data storage medium, at least to the genral public. However, Sony did release a digital camera that wrote to MDdata discs, and there are some professional recorders that record multitrack MD data discs. It is interesting that they're only now starting to apply ATRAC technology outside of the MD format.

    For more info on MD and ATRAC encoding, i reccomend Minidisc.org