Developers/Audiophiles: have you had a chance to play with aacPlus?
aacPlus - "MPEG-4 High-Efficiency AAC"
more info:
] http://www.osxfaq.com/Press/03-18-03/aac-03-18-03.ws
more info:
] http://www.osxfaq.com/Press/03-18-03/aac-03-18-03.ws
Comments
Originally posted by hmurchison
These people better get AAC moving. Right now I don't know if AAC is going to make a dent in MP3 at all. A small file savings won't matter to many consumers.
It does when it has to be streamed. Small file size savings actually make huge differences for the consumer in this case even if people are all moving to broadband.
Heck...it shaves download times. And the "small file savings that won't matter to many consumer" can actually amount to hundreds to thousands of MBs if you have lots of songs.
It ain't small file savings to me.
AACplus is going to be the natural champ for Streaming. And perhaps if they're lucky they can make some serious inroads to putting a dent into MP3.
Imagine how many Songs would fit on an iPod 40GB. It's almost embarrasing
Originally posted by hmurchison
KKS- Yeah you're totally right.
AACplus is going to be the natural champ for Streaming. And perhaps if they're lucky they can make some serious inroads to putting a dent into MP3.
Imagine how many Songs would fit on an iPod 40GB. It's almost embarrasing
Yeah...I can picture it now:
Someguy - "What songs do you have on this thing?"
Me - "All of 'em."
Originally posted by kim kap sol
But MP3 is too widely spread now. AAC and Ogg won't be able to replace it. Just like PCs...
That analogy really is quite poor. It's almost like saying Serial ATA will never take off because Parallel ATA has too strong a base or DDR2 has no place in the world because DDR is everywhere. One technology is just the natural progression of the other.
The only big thing that might halt AAC is licensing costs.
Originally posted by Telomar
That analogy really is quite poor. It's almost like saying Serial ATA will never take off because Parallel ATA has too strong a base or DDR2 has no place in the world because DDR is everywhere. One technology is just the natural progression of the other.
The only big thing that might halt AAC is licensing costs.
It was a frickin' joke.
i have an 11.64 gb itunes library, is it possible i'd be able to get it onto a 10 gb ipod?
Originally posted by gsfmark
how big is the file saving going to be?
i have an 11.64 gb itunes library, is it possible i'd be able to get it onto a 10 gb ipod?
I don't have any real numbers but I can pretty much guarantee an 11.64gb would be trimmed to 9gb or even less and have even higher quality sound at that size.
this aac stuff sounds neato to me!
Originally posted by gsfmark
thats awesome... how good is the quality? i have almost all my mp3's at 192 or better...
this aac stuff sounds neato to me!
I haven't played much with aac yet. But according to the linked article on aacPlus, you'd get CD-quality sound at 48Kbps. So even at 128Kbps (which would be well above CD-quality and better than 192Kbps MP3s), you'd get approximately a 33% reduction in file size.
As a result, aacPlus delivers streaming and downloadable 5.1 multichannel audio at 128 Kbps, CD-quality stereo at 48 Kbps, excellent quality stereo at 32 Kbps, and excellent quality for mixed content at 20 Kbps mono.
If you want to get an idea of ow much better AAC+ will sound vs AAC, compare mp3pro to mp3...try 64 kbit/s.
Originally posted by murk
So is this the format Apple's music service will use?
Hopefully...probably.
I'd love to see AAC 5.1 take off as well. My 5.1 system will be setup by years end. I just need a center channel and rear surrounds. I like the idea of 5.1 downloads.
'Sides, any "true" audiophile would not sway away from stereo sound for music (hey it said 'audiophile' in the subject).
And converting existing mp3 collections, well, if you don't want further loss in quality, you would need to redownload the music in aac (or rerip if you have the cds, uh huh
I've heard stories of songs sounding better from the Music Store than an aac rip at the same bitrate from CDs.
I'd love to have a sample aacPlus file to see if iTunes 4 can play them.
AACplus is not better than AAC. Neither is it worse. It is a companion codec designed for very low bitrates. It's main innovation is called SBR and that switches itself off above ~90kbps.
You wouldn't want to use this for your music collection for the exact same reason you wouldn't use mp3pro, it is designed for streaming and very low bitrates. It does its thing by making the best of a bad job, and does it very well by all accounts.
Audiophiles need not apply.
Also, Apple appears to be using the Dolby consumer AAC encoder in itunes, so unless they switch supplier, then they aren't going to be using this any time soon.
edit:
Oh, and the Apple encoded music probably uses a professional encoder. The consumer ones are tuned for speed over quality. There is a professional MP3 encoder that takes 8x -real time i.e. a 4 min song takes half an hour to encode.
This doesn't explain the odd reports of home ripped AAC sounding *better* than the store bought tunes. Very strange.