ATRAC

Abbreviation for Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding. ATRAC is an audio compression algorithm (CODEC) developed by Sony around1990 for storing information on minidiscs, which were in development at the time. Over the years various forms of ATRAC have been developed and released. Early versions were a significant step down from compact discs in terms of audio fidelity; however, more recent releases are quite capable of rivaling CD quality sound.