music formats

[mdp]

Hey there,

Having a lot of Atrac3plus music files for my Sony GigaJuke (file extension .oma) converted at a bite-rate 352 bps without adding copy-protection, would be very nice if I could use these files on my Phatbox.

Knowing Sony and their Apple-like way of protecting their rights    (gonna be hell of a job), could it be possible in the future to ad the atrac3plus format to the Phathack firmware?

Grtz Mdp

added a nice Track in the .oma format

[Terry_Kennedy]

Knowing Sony and their Apple-like way of protecting their rights    (gonna be hell of a job), could it be possible in the future to ad the atrac3plus format to the Phathack firmware?

Unfortunately, unless you want the PhatHack Media Manager to convert the files before writing them to the DMS, you'd need a player program that runs on the Phatbox to actually decode and play the files. It might be possible to reverse-engineer the interface between the relevant Phatbox software, but even if someone could do that the files might not be playable - as I recall, one of the formats added after the Phatbox was designed is right at the limit of the CPU power available, and can skip / drop out. I'm pretty sure that was Ogg, but may have been FLAC.

[mdp]

Hey Terry,

Thanks for your reply. I was expecting an answer like yours, my PhatBox runs flac very well (version v 3.92).
In my case by turning on the system it always starts up with the voice message "corrupt track" and then starts playing without any problem.
Flac sounds great yet didn't try any high bit-rate mp3's,

grtz mdp

[S80_UK]

High bit-rate MP3's should be OK, although I have little personal experience of them.  It is Ogg Vorbis that can cause the processor in the Phatbox to run out of steam with occasional decode glitches.  There are two versions of the decoder in order to help it deal with different bit rates, but it is not a complete fix.    FLAC is actually not too demanding if you can spare the disk space.  AAC is also handled well.

I suggest you take a look here... http://www.marcnetsystem.co.uk/

If you already have Sony's SonicStage on your PC and it can access your Atrac files, the HiMD Renderer can use the Sony decoder on your PC and then re-encode the files into a range of formats.  They even get tagged which is a neat trick, since the Atrac files don't themselves have tags in, Sony do things "differently".  It includes a batch mode which helps speed things up.  (And I didn't know it existed until I read this thread and went looking for the solution...)

[mdp]

I think that the "gap-less" playing of the files from atrac wil be lost while converting to other formats (except wav).
I'll go and look at the marcnetsystem site; I haven't seen much other way's to use my atrac files then playing them on my Sony devices.
mdp

[Terry_Kennedy]

I think that the "gap-less" playing of the files from atrac wil be lost while converting to other formats (except wav).

You can get gapless playback of MP3's if you're willing to do some extra work. Encode the entire album as a single MP3 with a constant bit rate (VBR will mess up the seek offsets). Then create a .m3u file that lists the start/end times (in seconds) of each track in the MP3 file, like this:

Code: [Select]

#More Than a Feeling
/dos/data/music/Boston_Boston.mp3       0       285
#Peace of Mind
/dos/data/music/Boston_Boston.mp3       283     587
#Foreplay/Long Time
/dos/data/music/Boston_Boston.mp3       585     1054
#Rock & Roll Band
/dos/data/music/Boston_Boston.mp3       1052    1235
#Smokin'
/dos/data/music/Boston_Boston.mp3       1233    1497
#Hitch a Ride
/dos/data/music/Boston_Boston.mp3       1495    1748
#Something About You
/dos/data/music/Boston_Boston.mp3       1746    1976
#Let Me Take You Home Tonight
/dos/data/music/Boston_Boston.mp3       1974    -1
When playing the album straight through, it will be completely gapless without needed any cross-fade hacks. When seeking to a track within the album, a little "slop" is programmed in because lots of older albums had 2 seconds of silence between tracks. In a perfect world, we'd always land in the silent spot when seeking. In practice, it isn't perfect because MP3s are counted by frames, while the Phatbox only has a resolution of 1 second. But it usually works fine.

There a number of non-obvious things you need to do to get this to work if you manage the DMS with PMM (either Music or Media version). If anybody's actually interested, I'll write it up.

[S80_UK]

I think that the "gap-less" playing of the files from atrac wil be lost while converting to other formats (except wav).

Convert to FLAC (same quality, roughly half the space).  I just did the "Dark Side of the Moon" test, from Atrac3 @ 132kbps to FLAC and I can't hear a gap.  Now there might be one, but it sounded very good to me, and I normally notice these things.  I have not yet tried this in the car. 

It occurs to me that if you did use this tool to convert to FLAC, you probably need to add seekpoints to the FLAC files so that they are seekable and so that resume after power down works correctly.  Easy to do from a batch file... I can post here if needed.

[mdp]

Ok didn't though of the idea to use flac at a (non-) losless format.
I think that's the solution !

Thanks mdp