LAME equivalent in AAC world ? Options

[chrizoo]

hi everyone.
I am new to AAC and have read a lot about the technical advantages of HE-AAC v2.

No my question would be:
In the mp3 world the flagship encoder is commonly considered LAME. Is there an equivalent in the AAC world?

What is the preferred choice by the community here?
I think the most important consideration is the quality of the encoder, isn't it? So which one would you guys recommend?

many thanks.

(OS: Windows)

This post has been edited by chrizoo: Mar 13 2010, 12:58

[Larson]

In AAC world there is not a "lame" equivalent,or better yet there is not a real and completely open source encoder. There used to be FAAC but that's history,many faac developers are into Nero now. We have more commercial implementations and also free. DivX is still in beta 1 since august so i wouldn't count on that for now,the two main encoders are Apple and Nero's,both high quality and pretty equal. If you're on Windows now you could also access Apple's AAC true VBR,thanks to nao,mac xld app creator (see thread about qtaacenc). A new AAC listening test is coming so that will maybe clear a bit about the "best" encoder by now but one thing for sure is that both Nero and Apple's encoder are high quality.

I do also believe that it's a shame we don't have a real open source like a Lame AAC,with true vbr settings and efficiency might be better to develop than mp3; I mean there is a lot of confusion about AAC encoding. I personally use Apple true VBR Q127 max because of its true vbr capabilities and fast decoding,at least as far as i've seen

This post has been edited by Larson: Mar 13 2010, 13:49