qtaacenc: a command-line QuickTime AAC encoder for Windows Options

[nao]

Hi,

As I already posted in the other thread, I released a tiny tool for Windows to access the QuickTime AAC encoder from the command line. Now some important features, gapless support and pipe encoding, have been added, so I've decided to create a dedicated thread for this software.

You can get the latest version here.

Any comments or questions are accepted in this thread.
Thanks

This post has been edited by greynol: Nov 28 2010, 01:03

Reason for edit: fixed link.

[tedgo]

Many thanks for this
Now i can use True VBR within foobar2000.

[Alexxander]

Interesting tool Thank you for your contribution nao.

To clear up, one question: One needs to have installed QuickTime Pro, right? (I'm no user of Apple software)

[grimes]

Thank you, nao, for that nice encoding tool.
Can't wait to test pipe encoding.

This post has been edited by grimes: Jan 22 2010, 11:37

[nao]

To clear up, one question: One needs to have installed QuickTime Pro, right? (I'm no user of Apple software)

No, pro version is not required.

[Alexxander]

The Free version will do? According to Apple's website it's only a Player. Or is QuickTime + iTunes necessary?

[nao]

The Free version will do? According to Apple's website it's only a Player. Or is QuickTime + iTunes necessary?

Well, qtaacenc directly calls QuickTime APIs to encode, so it doesn't depend on any external applications. You only have to install the latest version of QuickTime.

[Alexxander]

Thx. I've installed latest Apple QuickTime free version, downloaded your tool and configured foobar2000 v1.0 as you describe on you webspace. Converting from FLAC to m4a works like a charm on Windows 7 64-bits!

Is it easy to know which files of QuickTime installation are necessary? Maybe a full QuickTime installation can be avoided by just having a set of specific files (possibly against some Apple policy).

[guruboolez]

I've been waiting for this tool for many years. A million thanks for this, nao!

[IgorC]

Nao,
Thank you very much. Finally TVBR for Windows users.
Can you implmenet access to HE-AAC encoder as well?
I wonder if it's possible HE-AAC + TVBR. But HE-AAC with --highest will be already great.

Sometimes ago you quality-vs-bitrate graph it might be helpfull for people to get an idea what bitrates will be with tvbr.
Quality vs Bitrate

This post has been edited by IgorC: Jan 22 2010, 15:29

[nao]

Can you implmenet access to HE-AAC encoder as well?

Unfortunately, HE-AAC encoder is not available in QT for Windows.

[IgorC]

Itunes has the same speed as qtaacenc --normal.
--highest and --high give the identical output.

[punkyjet]

Thank you very much Nao.

[/mnt]

Thanks for this tool. It works pretty well on foobar2000.

[Xire]

Any comments or questions are accepted in this thread.
Thanks

Thanks a lot for your work. Tried it in several ways and worked just fine. What is the type of license for this file?

This post has been edited by Xire: Jan 22 2010, 17:12

[halb27]

Just tried, works fine.
Thank you, nao.

[nao]

What is the type of license for this file?

I'll apply BSD-style license.

[kornchild2002]

I am not sure what you have done but encoding speeds are fixed on my end. I was getting an average speed of 7x which was being reported by foobar2000 v1. Before, I was getting 1x encoding speeds so this is a vast improvement. I also tested gapless playback in iTunes and on my 120GB iPod classic. It all works just fine.

Now I have to start ABXing to determine if Lame 3.98.2, Nero 1.5.3.0, or QuickTime 7.6.5 is right for me.

Edit: I should say that the encoding speeds are from my 1.66GHz Atom powered netbook with 2GB of RAM. 7x is about average for me when it comes to Lame 3.98.2, Nero 1.5.3.0, and other encoders. The only one I have seen that really encodes fast (on this netbook) is the Xing mp3 encoder with speeds of about 15x. I would test on my desktop (four dual-core AMD Opteron 2214 processors at 2.2GHz with 8GB of RAM) but I don't have access to it yet. Encoding speeds on my netbook didn't increase when I sat it to two thread encoding (the Atom processor is hyper-threaded).

This post has been edited by kornchild2002: Jan 22 2010, 18:35

[lvqcl]

Thanks for the program, nao.

About encoding speed... Core2Duo 2.4 GHz; qtaacenc 20100122; "--tvbr 100 --highest - %d" (encoding via fb2k):

1 thread: ~20x realtime.
2 threads: ~39x realtime.

This post has been edited by lvqcl: Jan 22 2010, 21:41

[halb27]

I just found an issue when using True VBR at quality level 50.
The m4a files don't contain the last part of the original track.

Doesn't happen at quality level 100.

The exact limit seems to be quality level 58. For this level or below there is this issue.

This post has been edited by halb27: Jan 22 2010, 19:53

[nao]

I just found an issue when using True VBR at quality level 50.
The m4a files don't contain the last part of the original track.

Probably that is due to resampling. With the default setting, the output file is automatically resampled when the target bitrate or quality is low. To prevent this, use --samplerate keep option.

[halb27]

You're right, everything's fine when using --samplerate keep.
Thanks a lot.

[seVen]

Many thanks nao!

[[JAZ]]

Is it easy to know which files of QuickTime installation are necessary? Maybe a full QuickTime installation can be avoided by just having a set of specific files (possibly against some Apple policy).

There is Quicktime Alternative, but i am not sure if that contains the encoders, or just the decoders. You may want to try out.

[antman]

Tried it with QT alternative 3.1 and the application gives an error message, "this application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem."