Hello, I have never used AAC and I'd like to know which encoder and settings should I use to get same quality as musepack's "Xtreme" profile?

This is a rather difficult, if not impossible, question to answer.

The best bet is to simply listen and decide for yourself that way.

Then what encoder and settings should I use to get good or high quality? Or what settings should I start to get quality that is transparent to me?

The answer is in the question. Nobody can tell you what will be transparent for you. 64 kbps are enough for some people ; for other, 320 are not transparent.

...however, in general, a good start would be Nero AAC and the Transparent preset. Like both Dibrom and guruboolez said though, only you can decide what is perceptually transparent to your ears. Read the AAC section in the Wiki.

Thanks kl33per, I'll check it out.

You could try demo version of Poikosoft's Easy CD-DA Extractor now versioned at v6.5 build 2 : http://sivut.koti.soon.fi/poiko/ezcddax6.exe at :
http://www.poikosoft.com/download.html

It does have a good and simple GUI and implementation for FAAC-based Encoder (and decoder) both now near comparable to Nero's quality and btw: it's damn good app for worth it's price (just $29.95) to RIP/Convert/Burn all possible well-known audio formats fast and reliable and the most i like the way it can rip 99% of all the copy-prot. CD's (depending on CD-Rom drive used) ...

Just select a preset between ~64k and ~256k VBR - it defaults for both speed and quality - in this latest version more for quality - still having good speed for ripping or converting from f.e. mp3 or PCM ...

Regards : Mathias

Well, as others have said, this is impossible to answer without a massive amount of abx-ing music you like, but so far the transparent VBR profile in Nero AAC, and 192
kbps in Itunes/Quicktime is ball park transparent for average music. If you consider musepack extreme as YOUR normal setting, which is a click above musepack standard, then a click above for Nero AAC would be its extreme VBR profile, or 224 KBPS for ITunes/Quicktime. Again, abx test and compare.