Support and General Use > Audio Playback, Database and Playlists
AACplus/HE-AAC playback on Ipod 5G Video
saratoga:
I would use MP3 or Ogg instead. They're better supported, and functionally equivalent.
Gamesoul Master:
I like AAC because, at least in comparison to MP3, it provides better quality at the same bitrates (namely in the 100-150 kbps range that I use). I know little about OGG because of how little support it has with media players and media devices, so I've never bothered to even try it.
@TexasRockbox: AAC is MPEG-2/4 audio, the unofficial successor to MP3 audio (which is MPEG-1). It provides a quality superior to MP3 below 192 kbps (above that, it gets closer to equal). HE-AAC is High Efficiency AAC, which uses spectral band replication (and parametric stereo in v2, the newer but much less common version). XM uses the original HE-AAC v1, so you were indeed hearing HE-AAC music. If you didn't like that quality, you have very good ears (or they do some really horrible encoding). In that case... you'd probably not wanna touch anything encoded under a HE-AAC VBR below ~100 kbps (encoded as well as possible, which I'm sure XM doesn't do). If you tried LC-AAC (for listening on Rockbox or other devices), a VBR of around ~180 kbps with optimal encoding is good for transparency at decent volumes. These are both said under the assumption, of course, that you're transcoding/encoding from a loseless source.
saratoga:
--- Quote from: Gamesoul Master on July 31, 2007, 10:09:06 AM ---I like AAC because, at least in comparison to MP3, it provides better quality at the same bitrates (namely in the 100-150 kbps range that I use). I know little about OGG because of how little support it has with media players and media devices, so I've never bothered to even try it.
--- End quote ---
Well, thats what the marketing literature says anyway. In practice theres very little difference, the most important change being an improvement to the licensing that allows for stores selling DRMed music.
Febs:
--- Quote from: saratoga on July 31, 2007, 10:13:38 AM ---In practice theres very little difference, the most important change being an improvement to the licensing that allows for stores selling DRMed music.
--- End quote ---
This test is now slightly dated, but it demonstrates Saratoga's point:
MP3 and AAC showed no statistical difference in this 128kbps test.
Gamesoul Master:
Yeah, but that's just one test, and AAC has progressed since that time anyway. Look at this test or this one (that second one being by far the most recent), and it's clear that AAC beats out MP3, especially using good settings for the encoder. Creating the best MP3 and AAC files I could from a few songs, the difference was clear every time (which I did as a 96 kbps CBR blind test, since I wanted the best quality format without any bias).
But as anybody and everybody will say... it depends a lot on listening preference too. And so, test results will tend to vary from tester to tester.
For the record, I use Lame MP3 and Nero AAC, as those are the two best encoders I've found for those formats.
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