Glossary

MagicGate

Copyright protection technology that consists of authentication and encryption technology. Authentication ensures that protected content is transferred only between compliant devices and media, and that protected content is recorded and transferred in an encrypted format to prevent unauthorized copying or playback.

Note

is terminology denoting the copyright protection system developed by Sony. It does not guarantee conversion among other media.

OpenMG

Copyright protection technology that securely manages music content from the EMD/Audio CD on a personal computer. Application software that is installed on the computer encrypts the digital music content when recording on the hard drive. This allows you to enjoy music content on the computer, but prevents unauthorized transmission of this content across a network (or elsewhere). This PC copyright protection complies with “MagicGate”, and allows you to transfer digital music content from a PC’s hard drive to a compliant device.

ATRAC3

ATRAC3, which stands for Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding3, is audio compression technology that satisfies the demand for high sound quality and high compression rates. The ATRAC3 compression rate is approximately 10 times higher than that of the Audio CD, resulting in an increased data capacity for the media.

ATRAC3plus

ATRAC3plus, which stands for Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding3plus, is audio compression technology that compresses data higher than ATRAC3. The ATRAC3plus is new audio compression technology that enables equal or higher quality sound comparing to ATRAC3.

Bit rate

Indicates the data amount per second. The rate is reflected in bps (bit per second).

64 kbps means 64,000 bits of information per second. If the bit rate is large, that means a large amount of information is used to play music. Comparing music of the same format (e,g., ATRAC3plus), 64 kbps data offers better sound quality than 48 kbps data. However, audio files in formats such as MP3 have different encoding methods, and thus sound quality cannot be determined by simply comparing the bit rate.

42