About a month or so ago, the factory deck in my truck went kaput.  I travel (a lot!) on the weekends for my second job, with some pretty good distances from stop to stop, so it's nice to have a lot of good music.

Anyway, I went out and bought a Sony CD player (CD/CD-R/CD-RW/MP3/WMA/ATRAC3plus).  It's a really nice piece of equipment for the price, IMHO, and I burned four or five CDs worth of .mp3 files before heading out last weekend.

After hearing some good stuff about the ATRAC3plus format*, I'd like to burn a couple CDs to take with me this weekend.  My "archival copies," so to speak, are in the following formats: .mp3 (approx. 90%), .wav (approx. 8%), and .wma (approx. 2%).  This does not count the many CD-ROMs I have (which are, obviously, in .cda); that is just what's on my PC's hdd.

I'd like to hear your opinions about the ATRAC3plus format and the Sonic Stage software required to burn/rip .mp3, .wav, and .wma files into ATRAC3plus (.omg, IIRC).  From some stuff I've read online, the SS software is pretty hinky, some articles suggesting that resultant .omg files become forever interconnected to the .wav files used to create them (sounds kind of like 'entanglement theory' on steroids to me).

However, everything that I've read was in the context of keeping these on the PC or transfering them to portable media players (like iPod-type devices).  I haven't seen or read anything about the particular application I have in mind.

Best practices, caveats, lessons learned, etc are all welcome.

Thanks in advance.


* By "good stuff about the ATRAC3plus format," I mean strictly from a compression/reproduction standpoint.  I understand it's a proprietary standard format, and I'm not too keen on that.  However, these wouldn't be my archival copies of the music, just burning some CD-Rs and CD-RWs for some truck music.

Shameless BTT for the Saturday A.M. crew, now that most of the good cartoons are over.