AAC for foobar Options

[Frankie]

Hey Folks!

Besides Nero, is there any free AAC encoder I can use with foobar? (I don't wanna install QT or iTunes)

[Garf]

Hey Folks!

Besides Nero, is there any free AAC encoder I can use with foobar? (I don't wanna install QT or iTunes)

FAAC? Quality sucks though. There's some recompiles of the 3GPP reference software, but they don't support most encoding modes IIRC.

If you want decent quality, you'll need one of the commercial encoders.

[Lear]

With qaac you don't have to actually install QT, just download it, extract some of the files (easily done with 7-zip) and set up a configuration file. You can do similar things with a frontend to qtaacenc. Searching a little here at Hydrogenaudio should give you all information you need (I found it here, but I didn't bookmark the threads in question...).

[Frankie]

Thx everybody, I will take at look at this!

[Zarggg]

I currently use qtaacenc and find it works nicely.

Edit: Just noticed that you said you wanted to avoid installing QuickTime. qaac might be the way to go for you, since you can install a "portible" version of QuickTime (just the drivers contained in a local folder); I don't know if this can be done with qtaacenc.

This post has been edited by Zarggg: Oct 25 2011, 23:51

[K-Meleon]

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....8072&st=325

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, lvqcl made and uploaded a script for qtaacenc that extracts from the QuickTime install .exe. No installation is necessary.

[kennedyb4]

QTaacenc works well for me. The apple codec recently did extremely well in the last 96kbps listening test.

[Brand]

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....8072&st=325

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, lvqcl made and uploaded a script for qtaacenc that extracts from the QuickTime install .exe. No installation is necessary.

Link to the script is dead.
I tried with another tool from that thread to make QT portable, but it didn't work.

What's the simplest way to do it?

[lvqcl]

Do you want to use qaac or qtaacenc?

[Brand]

If it's more or less the same to setup I'd use qtaacenc. If perhaps qaac is easier I could also use that. (The encoded files are the same, anyway. Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

[lvqcl]

qtaacenc: modified executable (not the official) + registry hacks. qaac: official binary + no hacks, only DLL files. So IMHO qaac is preferrable.

Download makeportable.zip from https://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/cabinet and unpack it to obtain makeportable.cmd.
You also need 7z.exe and 7z.dll from 7-zip packer.
Also you need ItunesSetup.exe (or iTunes64Setup.exe or QuickTimeInstaller.exe).

Copy all files into the same folder and run makeportable.cmd. You now have QTfiles subfolder with all necessary files.

[Brand]

Thanks, got it working now with qaac.

Just to avoid confusion for anyone reading this: the resulting 'QTfiles' folder has to be placed with qaac.exe and other files (in the 'x86' folder).


What's generally a good setting for music? I'm looking for ~120-130kbps.

I'm currently using --tvbr 85 --no-optimize --ignorelength - -o %d. Foobar then reports the resulting file as TVBR q82, quality 96. Does this look ok?
(EDIT: I guess there's only TVBR 82 and the next step is TVBR 91.)

This post has been edited by Brand: Dec 18 2012, 23:38

[eahm]

Brand,

qaac settings:

Q0 - Q4 (0) = ~40 kbps
Q5 - Q13 (9) = ~45 kbps
Q14 - Q22 (18) = ~75 kbps
Q23 - Q31 (27) = ~80 kbps
Q32 - Q40 (36) = ~95 kbps
Q41 - Q49 (45) = ~105 kbps
Q50 - Q58 (54) = ~115 kbps
Q59 - Q68 (63) = ~135 kbps
Q69 - Q77 (73) = ~150 kbps
Q78 - Q86 (82) = ~165 kbps
Q87 - Q95 (91) = ~195 kbps
Q96 - Q104 (100) = ~225 kbps
Q105 - Q113 (109) = ~255 kbps
Q114 - Q122 (118) = ~285 kbps
Q123 - Q127 (127) = ~320 kbps

You will be ok with -V63 or -V73, http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Transparency

In any case, always ABX.

This post has been edited by eahm: Dec 19 2012, 01:48