Amazing ATRAC CD walkman (Sony Atrac CD/MP3 Walkman 64 MB)

Member Name: vouchers

Product:	Sony Atrac CD/MP3 Walkman 64 MB
Date:	09/08/03 (1640 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: up to 30 hours of music on 1 CD, easy to burn an ATRAC CD

Disadvantages: small screen

£80 from DABS or £90 from Dixons
D-NE511 Sony ATRAC3PLUS MP3 CD Walkman

Plays CD's, MP3 CD's and ATRAC CD's

This new CD player utilises the ATRAC Sony Minidisk compression software to enable you to record up to a maximum of approximately 490 tracks on to a normal CD-R or a CD-RW depending on which compression you choose

ATRAC3plus stands for 'Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding3' compresses to about 1/20 th of it's original size and bit rates are 64 kbps or 48 kbps

I have now recorded 3 CD-R's full of all my favourite CD's in my collection to play at work that's about 30 hours of music per CD

The software to do this will have to be installed on your PC using the supplied installation CD it's called Sonic Stage Simple Burner

When installed and run, the ATRAC program can collect MP3 music tracks from your computer or music tracks from your CD collection

On the left of the screen you can select from two tabs MP3 or CD

If you choose CD then all you have to do is make sure you are on the internet and put one of your favourite CD's in the rewriter and watch the screen as all the track information appears on the left side of the screen courtesy of Gracenote CDDB service for audio data recognition

There is a big button labelled 'ADD' in the centre of the screen, hit that and the CD is stored as an image in memory in ATRAC format and then appears on the right hand column of the screen.
All the track information is stored ARTIST, ALBUM NAME, TRACK NUMBER etc.

When you have recorded enough CD's - (I recorded 18 Albums in one hit on my first ATRAC CD) - then put a blank CD-R or CD-WR into the CD recorder and hit the big button labelled BURN on the right side of the screen

MP3 files on your computer can be burned on the ATRAC CD also

You don't have to worry about filling your ATRAC CD in one hit because yo

u have as many as 99 sessions of recording, which is about 5 tracks per session

You can play back your ATRAC CD through the supplied headphones or through a standard sound lead to your hi-fi or TV or computer

The player has the option of power by batteries or the supplied mains adapter

During playback you can scroll through all tracks using the small screen on the player and all the albums (which are called folders) to the one you want to hear
And it can play randomly inside a folder, the whole disk or starting at track one and playing all the way through to the end of the disk

No more fiddling with hundreds of CD's, just take a few ATRAC CD's with you wherever you go

It's so good that i'm thinking of buying a Car radio (digital radio of course) that has an ATRAC player included

Is the standard CD player now out of date?
You must buy one of these ATRAC CD players instead because it plays normal CD's and MP3 CD's also

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