Re: [linux-minidisc] About PC to MD

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

On 06/20/2013 12:21 AM, Taliesin Bardolobo wrote:
> > Do you mean we will get true SP transfers by USB or have understood it
> > wrong way? And if so, would this work only in HiMD or also in NetMD?
> > This would be fantaaaastic :D

I think you are still missing the point. It was *always* possible to
write true ATRAC SP tracks through NetMD onto a MiniDisc and never
possible using a HiMD:

NetMD players fully support ATRAC-SP to be backwards compatible with
classic MiniDisc players and recorders as these support ATRAC-SP only.

What actually happens is that the PC sends the NetMD device a PCM stream
which is encoded by the NetMD device into ATRAC-SP on the fly, there
is no ATRAC-SP encoder available in SonicStage, as far as I know.

However, since Sony does not grant you the ATRAC-SP quality when
transferring audio data to NetMD, they first transcode even lossless
audio formats into ATRAC-LP, then into PCM which is finally sent to
the NetMD device where it is encoded *by the device* into ATRAC-SP.

Again, if you want your NetMD recording to be playable on a classic
MiniDisc device, the tracks have to be ATRAC-SP. Sony just artificially
deteriorates the audio quality on purpose.

Therefore, the only thing the computer has to get proper ATRAC-SP
recordings is not to mess up with the audio quality in the first
place and send lossless audio directly encoded as lossless PCM
to the NetMD device and have the device encode the stream into
ATRAC-SP. And we already do that with our software. It would actually
more difficult and tedious to do it the way SonicStage does as
there is no free ATRAC-LP encoder that I know of.

As for HiMD: HiMD never supported ATRAC-SP. HiMD devices (in HiMD
mode) support ATRAC3+ with different quality settings as well as
uncompressed PCM audio.

Cheers,

Adrian

--
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
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`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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