ATRAC3plus

• Format tag: uses WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE with the "SubFormat" field set to the following GUID: E923AABF-CB58-4471-A119-FFFA01E4CE62
• Company: Sony
• Samples:
• Stored in: WAV and Oma/Omg containers.
• Official information: http://www.sony.net/Products/ATRAC3/tech/atrac3plus.html

ATRAC3plus introduction

ATRAC3plus is a proprietary compression algorithm for audio developed by Sony. As in the case of ATRAC3 ATRAC3plus represents the next generation of the ATRAC codec introduced in 1992 with the MiniDisc. Common use of that codec is in nowel Minidisc players and Portable Playstations made by Sony.

Streams coded with ATRAC3plus are usually stored either in the WAV container (those files have the ".at3" extension though) or in the Sony's proprietary Oma/Omg container. In the case of the WAV container the undocumented GUID:

E923AABF-CB58-4471-A119-FFFA01E4CE62

is used in order to indicate the ATRAC3plus codec.

There is very limited number of software products supporting encoding/decoding of the ATRAC3plus streams; most of them are unfortunately available for Microsoft Windows only. Those are:

• Sony's own SonicStage software (Windows only)
• ATRAC Codec Plugin for Sony Media Software (Windows only)
• Sonic Studio's expensive N-code plugin for professionals (available for Windows and Mac OS X)

There is a multi-channel version of ATRAC3plus called "ATRAC-X".

ATRAC3plus technical documentaion

Supported bitrates

ATRAC3plus operates on fixed bitrates only.