ATRAC stands forAdaptive Transform Acoustic Coding and ATRAC1 was first used in the 1990's with Sony's SDDS theater format system. The ATRAC term represents proprietarycompression algorithms created bySony Corp. and used with many of its digital audio electronics including MiniDisc and up until recently, it's web-based music download services. In theSDDS system, ATRAC1 offers 8 channel encoding with a rate up to 1168 kbit/s.
For a lot of listeners, this audio was pretty much indistinguishable from the source of the audio. ATRAC1 can be used for mono audio, doubling recording time. ATRAC technology was used with Sony'sMiniDiscformat which offered digital audio that was indistinguishable fromCD-Audio on much smaller physical media. Further evolution of the ATRAC system say its use in digital downloads and Sony Walkman-brand audio players (in fact, Sony's first digital audio devices didn't support the much more commonMP3 format.)
Sony is not the only manufacturer to support ATRAC in its products;Sharp andPanasonic are two examples of others who implemented the technology into their products.
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