Sony ATRAC3 playback

[zaphee]

Hi all, I'm new to Rockbox and it's my first post. (and sorry for my English, it's not my native language).

How is it possible to have an ATRAC3 playback capability in Rockbox ?
I had a Sony player which broke two weeks ago, so I'm probably going to switch to a Rockbox-supported iPod, and 1) I have about 1GB of music in ATRAC3 left on my computer that I can't transcode to OGG Vorbis (for example) and 2) Even if I could, transcoding to another format will be messy, will take somewhat long and lose quality.
I know that this format is far away from being open source, but Winamp programmers managed to make it work on their product (and Sony was not happy to see that, but... anyway), so why couldn't Rockbox coders do so ?...

[Chronon]

ATRAC3 has DRM, if I understand correctly.  Defeating DRM is a No-Do for Rockbox.

[zaphee]

Music I have doesn't seem to have DRM as far as i know... Some tracks are a long time old and they still play fine on both of my computers (not under Linux however).

[AlexP]

IIRC correctly, there are many different types of ATRAC3, and I very much doubt that you will find an open source low memory fixed point decoder for many, if any, of them.  You are welcome to try, but I suspect that most people will think that the huge task of writing one for a niche format would be a massive amount of work for very little gain.

[Vchat20]

Considering the vast nothingness that is the availability of any applications, trasncoders, encoers, decoders that can even understand the format, should be a good indication of the 'popularity' of the format. Not being condescending, but just an unfortunate truth. ATRAC3 is one of those extremely proprietary formats thought up by the geniuses at Sony much like their Memory Stick or UMDs.

To even consider putting the codec in rockbox you'd have to find an open source decoder that wasn't tied to a strict license. That would at least make it possible. Then you have to worry about the resource usage involved and how badly it would drag down the current rockbox supported players.

All in all, it would probably be MUCH easier to transcode it on your own to an existing open format. If quality is a concern, you could always use a lossless codec like FLAC (even if the ATRAC->* transcoder doesn't support FLAC, go to PCM WAV first then use any number of other applications to encode that to FLAC. No quality loss. Even then, ATRAC is lossy in itself that I recall. Go to a high bitrate ogg or mp3 file and you really won't be missing much quality.).

[zaphee]

Thanks for your replies.

OK, so I'll try to convert my music to Vorbis to be able to listen to it on my 1st gen nano I got delivered today.
Now waiting for Rockbox 3.2 to be released. (btw it rocks, tested it via an emulator).
Thanks for your advise.