Roberto, when is your next AAC test? I beleive it was to be January? What codecs and bit rates are you testing?

February.



No, in January was the MP3 at 128kbps test, which should start next wednesday.
And, in March/April, AAC winner vs. MP3 winner vs. Musepack, Vorbis and WMA Std.



I have not decided anything yet, but preliminarily:

-Nero
-iTunes/QuickTime
-Compaact!
-Faac
-NCTU FAAC (if they sort out their licensing issues until then). Else, maybe Winamp.
-Anchor: a surprise

All at 128kbps average (yes, it will be VBR/ABR)

Regards;

Roberto.

what about reals aac codec?

Real AAC == Coding Technologies == FhG consumer ~= Dolby consumer == Winamp

coool Roberto can't wait. Just upgraded to Nero 6 for the AAC and am doing some first pass non-blind testing. (APS versus Normal, not much of a difference to my ears.)

Looking forward to enrolling for some proper testing!

Keep up the good work!

Love,
Fairy

Thanks Roberto! I may actually buy one of the new mini-iPods, easpecially if they re-price them at $200. I need a tiny player for working out, where the Nomad Zen Xtra just does not work. I am waiting on your test before I decide to transcode my Monkey's Audio files to M4A with Nero or iTunes. I hope Nero quality has improved because it much easier to transcode with FB2K than to convert my Monkey's Audio files to WAV and then compress with iTunes.

Looking forward to the MP3 test as well.

It will really be a surprise!

Something from Yogoslavia hits my mind...

If Winamp release 5.01 with MP4 support prior to your test, please consider including it It'll probably be used much more than NCTU-FAAC...

@Latexxx

Eh, who knows....

Erm... no. An anchor is meant to be the worst sample often (not necessarily always). And I believe Psytel is still better than Faac.


@danchr: I will

Either ISO AAC or MP3 would be good anchors

My anchor is already more or less decided. I just don't want to discuss it before the official discussion starts

The AAC test discussion will probably start early next month, and the test itself will probably start on February 18th.

We licensed Coding Technologies' aacPlus implementation, but have currently exposed only the AAC baseline part for encoding. I do not know the details of any of the implementations you mention, but I am slightly confused by your notation. Does it indicate CT and FhG Consumer sound the same as Dolby Consumer, based on a listening test, or is the same? According to my sources, the Dolby encoder is quite different from CT and FhG, having replaced default Fhg psycho and loop-of-loops ratecontrol with techniques from AC3, while it is not known to us how much CT's implemention differs from FhG... Dolby wrote an AES paper on their consumer encoder, detailing changes and listening-test results.

Note that I am not lobbying for any changes to the planned listening test, I just wanted to point out that these implementations are not entirely identical.

No. I put the tilde there to indicate they are similar. From information I got from several developers, it seems the AAC standard creators (FhG, Dolby, Nokia, AT&T and Sony) share a good part of their AAC implementation codebase.



I see.

To the best of my knowledge the CT LC AAC codec is the same as FhG's consumer codec, pretty much as the CT MP3pro codec uses the MP3 fastenc codec as baseline.



I see. Then maybe it's their Professional encoder that is similar to FhG's, not the Consumer one. I never got that clarified.



Well, lobby at will if you want, nothing has been decided yet

Thanks for the information.

Regards;

Roberto.

If Psytel is so good then why not include it in this test. You will not know if it's really better than FAAC until you test it.
Have you done any psytel vs faac listening tests recently?

There are already too many codecs. And Psytel won't be developed ever again. Now, the fight of "Best free AAC encoder" should be FAAC vs. iTunes instead of FAAC vs. Psytel.



No, I never perform listening tests. But I talked to people who did. And, last but not least, I said I BELIEVE it's still better, not that it is.