Just found out about this one:
I’m not a user of Ipod, but I’ve been told that AAC already been in use with that platform. Anyone heard it? I currently use ogg vorbis, but it would be good if a better ‘standard’ than mp3 took hold.
ogg is better then aac. ogg is open source and sounds better. there is no drm shit in it and it will not suddenly turn to a “bad format” like mp3. I had the chance lately to listen to tunes in itunes, and the compression really sucks. I cant understand apple did choose this low quality as standard. I will stay with ogg for the time being.
because no other did, and apple is leader in Ipod and ITMS. But however mp3maker 2005 of magix does support this, too. But if you are looking for a better compression try muse pack (exact audio copy).
AAC shines with low bitrates. SomaFM has some 48kbps AAC streams that sound as good as 128kbps mp3.
AAC is also part of MP4, so there likely will be wide hardware sopport in the future.
but I encoded some of my jazz stuff with itunes from CD, and it sounded terrible, the hihats getting flangy and the bass wobbling around and all. or is that something different ?
dunno, never tried iTuens. I think aac is rather flexible and has some different profiles, I don’t know how iTunes uses aac.
Also I don’t know how aac compares to Vorbis on high bitrates.
Personally I use Vorbis, but I might migrate to aac for the sake of hardware compability.
But… I think I messed somethingup, cause the SomaFM streams actually are aacplus (just checked it) which seems to be a twist of aac especially done for low bitrate encoding.
It’s true since I know about OGG I don’t even understand why everyone sticks to MP3 ore even MP4.
Better AND free.
Don’t think so, i’ve been playing around with it back in '98, yes AAC is very good at low bitrates.
It started with the VQF format from jpn, it was being deployed commercially by Yamaha, but soon some other guys came up with the AAC format which was pretty much the same, but free to encode. The only problems with AAC is there are various AAC formats and they are not compatible (not all players support all AAC formats)
One of the players i used in the beginning days for the only two AAC formats that were the only ones then was Kjofol.
But to be honest, OGG has a better quality at all the rates and is more widely supported thus has a future.
I don’t think AAC has a future because it exists pretty much for seven years now and i still don’t notice that it has taken over the world.
I’ve been really satisfied with the AAC encoded by iTunes (set to a 160 or 192kbps quality). Not sure how it compares to OGG, though there is no question in my mind that it trumps MP3 and WMA.
At low bitrates (talking about <= 50kbps) AAC is doing really good. It can even top OGG if you encode with 24kbps - you’ll still have 32khz with quiet a good quality.
Before I knew AAC, I used to encode with Qdesign (Quicktime .mov) for streaming with 24kbps.
If you go up to 80 kbps, then OGG is definately better. AAC @80 kbps sounds to me like OGG @64 kbps.
MP3 can’t reach the quality at all although the newest codec is very impressing even at 80 kbps.
For WMA I can’t find any use anymore by now. It attacks so slowly that it turns your closed HiHats to brushes. As for VQF which sounds pretty much the same as WMA to me.
Another alternative is MP3PRO …some shoutcast stations are using it already. Though I don’t have enough experiance with MP3PRO, I think that it’s probably better than ogg at 64kbps. Anyone experianced the same?
However, at the end I’ll stick up to ogg because it’s free and most impressing at bitrates from 80 and higher. Too bad, it’s not that known in the Mac-world seemingly.
mp3pro is a patented Thomson technology. So far only Thomson hardware players support it, player-producers have to pay to add support for it in their software. Because of this it is unlikely that for example Free Software users would be able to listen to those tunes.
And I doubt it’s really much better than ogg.
Thanks, DDSpeed.
As said, I also prefer ogg. The only thing that bothers me about ogg, is that it artificially boosts up frequencies around 16khz. No matter at which kbps I compress to ogg (even with the newest encoder), still the result will sound a bit brighter than the original. But well…it’s not really a loss of quality for me, so I can live with it.