I use EAC to extract audio tracks and I would like to let it encode into AAC, but it only allows some AAC encoders, and from what I've heard they are not the best ones.

Nero's AAC plugin is not free, so I can't use it in a long term

I want to encode for transparent listening.

What can you advise?

Thanks.

C'mon guys, can anyone tell me if I should use PsyTel or FAAC or other AAC encoder for transparent listening ?

Psytel -normal.

It's enough for most tracks. But it's kinda slow.

Slow... What about a faster encoder?

What about a different format then?

Well, go with Faac then. Quality is possibly worse though.

A good, free and fast choice would be iTunes, but you can't automate it from EAC - at best, you can rip to Wav with EAC and batch convert to AAC with iTunes.

What about using "nencode.exe" ?

The nencode program relies on Nero library file(s) to encode.

I already tried it. It seems kinda slow and it's limited to 50 times because my Nero AAC plugin is not registered (I'm not willing to pay for it anyway )

Or, just use EAC to rip the cd to a .wav/.cue file securely, then mount it with Daemon-Tools, and rip/encode/tag/etc. all in iTunes.

This is what i'm doing, and it works perfectly with CDDB lookups and everything

I don't like the idea of doing all those steps. I prefer doing everything within EAC (using an external AAC encoder directly from EAC).

I have a question about your method. How does iTunes deal with non-silent gaps between songs? Do you know if it keeps them? If so, where does it append them? What about non-silent pre-gaps to track 1? As I am trying to decide between the Rio Karma and the iPod this info would be important to me.

Have you seen this page and the notes below the MusePack instructions?

http://www.saunalahti.fi/cse/EAC/

Instructions for PsyTel (either version could easily be configured, or save the config setup in EAC and use either as appropriate) and FAAC

It looks like you can use any switches you want, just put them where the switches are there now. (If you'd rather have switches other than -normal for PsyTel, you can do that.) Note the use of the arguments %s and %d varies some.

Haven't tried to figure it out, but presumably wapet.exe could be used to pass variables to any encoder that has an .exe version, if none of the many encoders listed there suit you.

Try this thread:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....howtopic=17678&

It is easier to automate FAAC than Psytel. So rar as I have been able to go, Psytel will require an additional step of using mpeg4creator to add the mp4 container while FAAC has this built in with the -w option.

Use this for additional command line options:

/c c:\windows\faac\faac.exe -q 150 -c 21000 -w %s %d && c:\windows\faac\tg.exe %d --artist "%a" --album "%g" --track "%n" --title "%t" --genre "%m" --year "%y"

(all on one line)

external encoder is cmd.exe, file extension m4a.


The -q 150 and -c 21000 are the hightest quality settings recommended over at www.audiocoding.com (wikki, links, faac, I think). Some discussion I have seen around here might indicate -c 18000 and a higher value for -q, but I don't know the right answer. Anyone want to chime in on this?

At 160k I could not tell if Psytel is better than the latest FAAC from Case. You can always try raising the bitrate to improve things.

If all else fails, get Nero. The burning program is great.

@Byuzzy, the instructions at Case's site create ape tags. If tg.exe is used iTunes compatible tags are created.

As far as speed is concerned, none of the AAC encoders are really fast. But Lame is not fast either. For speed, try the P4 optimized version of oggenc from Rarewares. Or, a processor upgrade.

Good point on the tags, I don't use them so it wasn't something I was focused on.

Though looking around here - one listening test in particular - suggests that Nero or PsyTel is a better than FAAC.

@Buzzy

The test that you are mentioning is probably Roberto's. It was done at 128 kbps. At incresed bitrates it gets harder to tell different codecs apart. I believe at the start of the thread it was stated that compression would be to a transparent level and the desire was to use a free codec. Perhaps that can be achieved with FAAC at some nominally higher bitrate than Psytel. Nero is not free.

In gereral...

After some experimenting, I do not think it is possible to use EAC to rip, encode Psytel, tag and add the mp4 wrapper in a single operation. The mp4 wrapper requires a separate process, even if it is a short one, using Foobar or Ivan & Menno.

It is possible to do everything with Psytel in a single operation using dbpoweramp or Foobar with the former being a bit easier to use. However, the starter of the thread indicated that EAC was desired, which also ruled out iTunes. EAC is a great program that I have used for several years. But, most of the time for most people, other rippers will do a decent job. An occasional pop or click will get past EAC. The secure mode is a bit too secure for badly scratched disks. On some of these hard cases I switched to burst mode and the results were very good.

Finally, it is hard for me to understand why some people like some very labor intensive methods of compressing their music. This includes manually tagging tracks or manually separating multiple tracks ripped as a single wav. Anyway, they are free to to as they wish. There is more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. (I don't really skin cats, to all you cat lovers.)

Won´t this work also with EAC?
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=12814