ATRAC Advanced Lossless is a newly developed lossless audio compression technology for users who demand CD quality without compromise.  This new technology is able to compress CD music data to approximately half its original size^*2 without losing any information, and it therefore offers CD quality playback.

ATRAC Advanced Lossless data incorporates ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus data, which means not only can you enjoy CD quality playback on your PC, but by extracting only the ATRAC3 or ATRAC3plus data, the files can also be easily transferred and listened to on ATRAC-compatible equipment.

*2 Depending on the track, the recorded data in size may vary to approximately 30-80% that of the original CD.

Compression is scalable to match the performance of the playback device

ATRAC Advanced Lossless records both the information of ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus,the residual information that ATRAC3 or ATRAC3plus eliminated. This means that the ATRAC3 or ATRAC3plus data can be extracted just as it is, or the eliminated information can be added to perfectly reproduce the information on the original CD. This data compression technique that playback device is able to choose the way to playback the data according to its capability, is called “scalable compression.”

When you want to listen to particular CD-quality tracks on your PC and also listen to them out on your portable music player, conventional lossless or audio compression technologies force you to create and store both types of data on your PC.  ATRAC Advanced Lossless, only requires that you store one type of data on your PC, meaning you need not recompress the data and allowing the data size to remain small.