Wow, the whole AAC biz is one big mess. I've been reading up on this stuff for hours now, skipping between this forum, rarewarez stuff, audiocoding.com, ISO spec sites. I'm sure I can eventually 'get it' but I figure its easier asking, maybe others will even thank me for it so here goes

Given the current developments and 'the future' (get out your crystal balls)..
What would be the AAC format and encoder of choice? Especially in my case compatibility with my portable player (Apple Ipod) is important.

You see there are so many encoders out there already, nero, faac, quicktime and so many different AAC subformats that I've just lost track.

First of all. what container format does the ipod accept? I have a windows box&pod so I am assuming we will get AAC support Soon™.. until that time I can't test. But even if I could, maybe the ipod support for <another mutation> just one firmware upgrade away. I don't know what the ipod can pull CPU wise (its an Arm7 CPU right?) but maybe all is possible soon..

Does it accept:

.mp4 files?
.aac files?
.m4p files?
.m4a files?

Headers? ADIF? ADTS anyone?

Frankly I don't know the differences between the above, I think MP4 and AAC are 'raw' streams while m4p and m4a are some DRM container thing but don't quote me on that.

Secondly does the ipod accept

AAC LC (I think it does.. Low complexity easy to decode)
AAC Main (No idea.. Main system, harder to encode, probably better quality)
AAC HE (I dont think so but just asking.. High Efficiency has some tricks (SBR) to make the most of low bitrates but I hear that over 96kbps SBR is not a good choice anyway..)
Maybe 'VBR'?

And finally any informed opinions what the best encoder is to use right now? I don't really care for the price of it (within reason of course), I just want to buy one thing and not regret it after half a year, and well freeware is fine too of course I do know from rmajorim's test that quicktime 6 seemed to be the encoder of choice but for me things like batch encoding and tagging is very important. I've come to understand that with quicktime I would need to manually drag one source file at a time into it? Tagging? Eep? Anyone??

I haven't bought my iPod (yet), but from what I've read here and at other places the iPod supports AAC files as long as they are in a container (mp4). As for encoder, I've decided to stick with Nero's AAC encoder using the Transparent setting; I suggest you do some ABX tests with the encoders you're considering and figure out what's transparent to you. (If you do end up with Nero, like me, you should probably wait until Friday's update before you start encoding, as it promises to fix many bugs).

The windows iPod is no different from the Mac iPod; you can reformat it and start uploading AAC files to it using ephpod or Sveta Portable Audio.

As for formats, the iPod supports only LC AAC at this time , Main, LTP and HE AAC are not supported (hopefully this statement isn't wrong; I'm not sure about Main & LTP).

For tagging, use Foobar2000. I thought Nero was supposed to have a tag editor too, but I haven't found it yet.

Edit: related threads:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=10930
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=10459
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=10325

Sveta portable audio will also allow creation (if a CD is ripped) or editing of tags on mp4 files in a manor compatible with Foobar, Nero and iTunes.

Quicktime uses another incompatible tagging method...

Nope, that's correct, at least my experience with my iPod - LC seems to only work, the iPod blatantly refuses to play the other types.

Puntloos, I recently jumped into the AAC-with-iPod quagmire after a bit of trepidation. It's still slightly messy, but for what it matters, this is what I use:

1) Rip music from CD using EAC and Psytel AAC encoder - tell EAC to name files as "tracknumber - artist - album - track title". You can choose whichever way you may wish to go...
2) Use Ivan & Menno to convert the .aac files over to .mp4
3) Drag the files into Foobar2000 and use the Masstagger to tag them accordingly - you can tell Foobar2000 to "guess values from filename" in a particular order, which will save a lot of time.

From here, I usually use Sveta to transfer them over. I would normally use EphPod, as I do for all of my other music, but it seems to currently have issues reading the Itunes-compatible tags that Foobar2000 writes, so I use Sveta for the moment.

I assume that the next release of EphPod will read the iTunes tags correctly...

Sveta does have an extremely easy-to-use rip-encode-transfer-to-iPod option which does all the werk for you, so you might prefer to use that. I use EAC for the drive options, as some of my hardware is extremely odd.