Why are iPods the only DAPs to support AAC/MP4?, There must be an answer to this. Options

[radlsf]

Seems like with all the M4As floating around out there, all Apple's competitors would be tripping over each other to offer DAPs with AAC support. But as far as I know no one does. Is there a simple reason for this?

[Nayru]

There is a simple answer. The creators of AAC demand substantial fees for the use of their technology. Nobody wants to pay for AAC when they can get equivalent audio quality using Ogg Vorbis for free.

Since Apple was the first to support AAC, it's suspected that Apple negotiated a special deal to license the technology for much less than what others must now pay. Obviously they're not willing to talk about that, but it's quite advantageous to Apple to keep the AAC market to themselves.

[Mike Giacomelli]

Seems like with all the M4As floating around out there, all Apple's competitors would be tripping over each other to offer DAPs with AAC support. But as far as I know no one does. Is there a simple reason for this?

There are M4As floating around? Can I ask where? Theres the stuff Apple sells, but thats not M4A, and not playable by anything but Apple's hardware.

[Jojo]

There is a simple answer.  The creators of AAC demand substantial fees for the use of their technology.  Nobody wants to pay for AAC when they can get equivalent audio quality using Ogg Vorbis for free.

really? So how come so few mp3 players support ogg?
There are license fees for mp3 / wma as well and still the majority of mp3 players supports it...

[benski]

There is a simple answer.  The creators of AAC demand substantial fees for the use of their technology.  Nobody wants to pay for AAC when they can get equivalent audio quality using Ogg Vorbis for free.

really? So how come so few mp3 players support ogg?
There are license fees for mp3 / wma as well and still the majority of mp3 players supports it...

There are some 'DAP on a chip' chips that support mp3 and WMA w/o any engineering effort by the manufacturer (e.g. http://www.semic.sanyo.co.jp/eng/product/s...n/audio/mp3.htm and http://www.vlsi.fi/vs1003/vs1003.shtml)

This post has been edited by benski: Jan 28 2006, 05:58

[loophole]

There are a few, Panasonic makes some ones that play AAC off the top of my head. there was a thread about it before.

[guruboolez]

There is a simple answer.  The creators of AAC demand substantial fees for the use of their technology.  Nobody wants to pay for AAC when they can get equivalent audio quality using Ogg Vorbis for free.

The license fees is rather small compared to the expensive price of most flash/HDD players:
http://vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/license.terms.html

I suppose that Creative, Philips, iRiver, etc... are not supporting AAC because there's currently no demand for it. A lot of consumers are more interested by design, battery life, video support or color LCD screen than another audio format which doesn't bring any substantial improvement over MP3. It might change with HE-AAC, but currently AAC is not very popular (and often considered as a proprietary and closed technology which belongs to Apple).

[sven_Bent]

my nokia phone plays .aac music

[Latexxx]

my nokia phone plays .aac music

Basicly all new Nokia phones play aac, he aac and he aac+.

[sh1leshk4]

my nokia phone plays .aac music

Which means?

[Garf]

There is a simple answer.  The creators of AAC demand substantial fees for the use of their technology.  Nobody wants to pay for AAC when they can get equivalent audio quality using Ogg Vorbis for free.

Since Apple was the first to support AAC, it's suspected that Apple negotiated a special deal to license the technology for much less than what others must now pay.  Obviously they're not willing to talk about that, but it's quite advantageous to Apple to keep the AAC market to themselves.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

AAC licensing fees are too small to matter much to someone who is selling a device.

AAC support in portable devices existed ages for Apple entered the market, but was always small because those players didn't make the kind of impact iPod + iTunes made.

Almost all new phones support AAC, and often HE-AAC out of the box.

This post has been edited by Garf: Jan 28 2006, 10:07

[fairyliquidizer]

Seems like with all the M4As floating around out there, all Apple's competitors would be tripping over each other to offer DAPs with AAC support. But as far as I know no one does. Is there a simple reason for this?

The fees are roughly the same as the MP3 licence fees.

There are hardware players (especially phones were HE-AAC is particularly attractive for streaming and low bandwidth downloads).

I would like to see more hardware options as it would be nice not to have to rerip all my music if in the future I wish to buy a non-Apple DAP.

This post has been edited by fairyliquidizer: Jan 28 2006, 14:30

[JeanLuc]

There are some Pioneer car CD-Receiver headunits that support AAC as well ...

[loophole]

Also most Sony Ericsson ones support AAC (with .mp4 or .m4a filenames) - even the Walkman.

[chelgrian]

AAC licensing fees are too small to matter much to someone who is selling a device.

I believe Apple negotiated a rediculously small cap on the license fee in any case. It's not the (patent) license fee for the decoder in the iPod that's the problem anyway it's the license fee for the encoder in iTunes which is given away free.

Apple just stumped up a few million dollars upfront to get MPEG LA to go away. There are other factors. Most of these devices use the same hand optimised assembler AAC decoder and the license for that implementation is not small. Again if you are a big company like Apple or the phone companies you can afford one big upfront payment rather than a per device royalty.

[Busemann]

There are M4As floating around?  Can I ask where?

You're kidding right? I could bet my left kidney the majority of iTunes users rip their music to AAC, simply because it's the default.

[bond]

the sony PSP supports aac in mp4

[Garf]

AAC licensing fees are too small to matter much to someone who is selling a device.

I believe Apple negotiated a rediculously small cap on the license fee in any case. It's not the (patent) license fee for the decoder in the iPod that's the problem anyway it's the license fee for the encoder in iTunes which is given away free.

Apple just stumped up a few million dollars upfront to get MPEG LA to go away. There are other factors.

Of course this is what is done. How do you think the free Winamp can offer AAC support, for example? Only way to reasonably do this is a flat rate deal.

In any case, license fees aren't the issue. If they were, the push for Vorbis support would be much stronger from the producer side (now it's almost entirely from the consumer side).

This post has been edited by Garf: Jan 28 2006, 20:08

[HotshotGG]

In any case, license fees aren't the issue. If they were, the push for Vorbis support would be much stronger from the producer side (now it's almost entirely from the consumer side).

This is true . I was always under the impression that MP3 liscensing fees were exactly the same as AAC, except the liscensing for MP3 was "relaxed" by Fraunhoffer/Thomson. I think a lot of DAP don't support it due to the fact that it's heavily patented.

AAC support in portable devices existed ages for Apple entered the market, but was always small because those players didn't make the kind of impact iPod + iTunes made.

This is also true. They do such a good job shoving IPod's down people's throats.

This post has been edited by HotshotGG: Jan 28 2006, 21:08

[Ivan Dimkovic]

I believe Apple negotiated a rediculously small cap on the license fee in any case. It's not the (patent) license fee for the decoder in the iPod that's the problem anyway it's the license fee for the encoder in iTunes which is given away free.

Actually, there is no need for anyone to negotiate separately - for PC software, you just have to pay already defined annual cap:

http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4...ense.terms.html

Which is $275.000 as of today - not too much if you have significant revenues from that software. After that you pay annual cap - you have all rights to distribute PC AAC software in any quantity you want without paying extra fees.

Furthermore, for hardware devices, if you sell huge quantities of those, as you can see - rate is $0.12 per device, which is not so much if we are talking about pricey HDD DAPs, isn't it?

This is true wink.gif. I was always under the impression that MP3 liscensing fees were exactly the same as AAC, except the liscensing for MP3 was "relaxed" by Fraunhoffer/Thomson. I think a lot of DAP don't support it due to the fact that it's heavily patented.

MP3 licensing fees are actually more prohibitive and expensive than AAC licensing fees:

http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/hardware.html

$0.75 per unit (hardware license)

And, furthermore, MP3 licensing imposes additional fees and restrictions for distributing the MP3 material for commercial purposes.

This post has been edited by Ivan Dimkovic: Jan 28 2006, 21:21

[benski]

In any case, license fees aren't the issue. If they were, the push for Vorbis support would be much stronger from the producer side (now it's almost entirely from the consumer side).

I've found that some companies (both content producers and playback) feel that Xiph's claim of Vorbis being patent-free might not be legally sound. I know there's been a lot of discussion about this (including a few long threads on HA). Unfounded as it may be, it's certainly a legitimate business risk decision. It's easier to pay a few bucks per device to MPEG-LA than to worry about the patent status of Vorbis.

[radlsf]

There are M4As floating around?  Can I ask where?  Theres the stuff Apple sells, but thats not M4A, and not playable by anything but Apple's hardware.

I'm assuming that most iPod owners (70% of the market?) are encoding CDs using iTunes, using iTunes default (and higher quality) option, M4A. It stands to reason that a big proportion, if not majority, of the tracks encoded from people's private CD collections are M4A. Remember frequenters of this forum aren't a typical sample.

[loophole]

A little bird told me that if your CD was scratched and you needed to download a new copy from the internet *rolls eyes* you can find most tracks in AAC easily on limewire by searching for .m4a + title. Actually I've legitimately been doing this as the CDRW/DVD in my PowerBook died out of warranty a month ago and i can't rip anything i've gotten since. They're generally good quality files too, QT and iTunes versions used to encode embedded in the file, not like searching for mp3's and playing guess-the-quality-lame-encode.

On another point, i'm suprised to see Sony's support for AAC in their phones (+walkman) and PSP. They ignored MP3 until it was too late in favour of trying to promote ATRAC, it's strange to see them embracing MPEG4 so openly. Maybe we'll see AAC support on their Network Walkmans in the future? (I'd still buy an iPod)

[Gabriel]

There is a simple answer.  The creators of AAC demand substantial fees for the use of their technology.  Nobody wants to pay for AAC when they can get equivalent audio quality using Ogg Vorbis for free.

Since Apple was the first to support AAC, it's suspected that Apple negotiated a special deal to license the technology for much less than what others must now pay.  Obviously they're not willing to talk about that, but it's quite advantageous to Apple to keep the AAC market to themselves.

Kidding? AAC decoding license is quite cheap for a portable player.
The fact is that there is no user demand for it, that's all. Apple is not considering user demand for its product, they are creating it, as usual.

[Otto42]

There are M4As floating around?  Can I ask where?  Theres the stuff Apple sells, but thats not M4A, and not playable by anything but Apple's hardware.

Not to be nitpicky, but the iTunes music store does send standard, unencrypted, MPEG 4 AAC audio to the iTunes client. It's the client that adds the Fairplay encryption. Odd, but true. So, in a sense, they are selling M4A files, it's the client that turns them into M4P files.