Why don't more portables support aac? It's an industry-wide standard, widely agreed as the next-gen of mp3, and on a whole is better than mp3 in terms of sq, compression, gap, and cpu usage. Plus, compatability would allow itune files to be played.

so why not? are licensing costs prohibitive?

very. AFAIK.

There's something I don't understand though.

If MP4/AAC is supposed to be a "successor", what is mp3PRO then supposed to be?

Few big companies are interested in new audio format promotion. I guess that most people on the world (a lot are not used to browse internet board, or don't have internet at all) are happy with mp3 or wma.
Nevertheless, AAC have now an impressive Armada of big software companies behind:

- Apple
- AOL/Winamp
- Nero
- Real

Later maybe this year Sony will follow (UMD format should support AAC).

And according to Ivan Dimkovic (IIRC), decoding chip supporting both mp3 and aac were recently released.

Therefore, AAC currently benefit of a favorable structural sitaution. I guess that 2004 or 2005 will be the year of AAC format.

Actually, AAC licensing is less expensive than MP3 licensing, and on par with WMA licensing prices.



A bandwidth extension hacked over MP3 by CodingTechnologies alone (and not by the MPEG), with no public specifications nor reference source code. That's why it didn't become popular.

@adlai: AAC isn't better than MP3 on CPU usage. AAC requires about 33-50% more horsepower than MP3 for real time decoding.



I don't know if he meant HE AAC, but AAC LC + MP3 decoder chips have been available for years from Micronas and Texas, among other DSP manufacturers.

A quick look at MS's site suggests WMA is substantially cheaper for hardware devices:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme.../licensing.aspx

and then

http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4...ense.terms.html

I don't know if thats the whole story, but it certainly looks cheaper. That would definately suggest one reason AAC support is so limited. WMA is basically a functional equivilent, except cheaper.

... for believing Microsoft's site.



Wrong URL.

http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg2...ense.terms.html

For large quantities, the prices are the same ($0,10/decoder)

.

I suspect part of it is due to lack of interest among the Korean public. Nobody in Korea ever bugs the portable manufacturers for AAC/MP4 support.

@kjonlee:
The original question was: Could you be more explicit what this got to do with Korea? Do you mean Korean public is setting the trend for the rest of the world? There are other companies than iRiver.

@adlai: Let me tell you why. Because MP3, even with a horrible encoder and at 128kbps, is good enough for the public. They don't even know what lossy means. How could you explain them why AAC is worth giving a try? Collectivism ... is the root of all evil.

Sad but true. Heck, I work in an IT department with about 40 other geeks. You would think that some of these computer geeks would care about audio quality. Nope. Not a one.

I've tried to talk to a few of them about it (sound quality). The few that are into music that is. They just put their foamy portable headphones on and groove out to downloaded blade mp3's. Ignorance is bliss.

It took me nearly two years to convince the guys in my IT dept that LAME and EAC were the way to go. Now they look back and shudder at the 160k and lower CBR MP3s they ripped. They used a variety of codecs, including Xing. Many people are just not aware that there IS an audible difference in the finished MP3 file. Education is all we can offer, they have to desire to find quality. Thank you once again Hydrogen Audio for showing me the light.

AAC is coming. My Nokia 6230 phone has AAC support. Ok, I don't have it yet, although it's pre-ordered.

People who have a life just don't care about dumb stuff we do, it's interesting from a scientific point of view but just for playing you weeks favorite music I don't think normal people will lose sleep over some slight artifact which they would never have noticed if you didn't point out.

Err did you read either link?

At 10,000,000 decoders (to get the 10 cents a piece discount) AAC would be $1,000,000 while WMA is only $400,000 since according to your link, there doesn't seem to be a license cap. I wouldn't call that "the same" so much as 2.5 times as expensive. For lesser volumes (since I doubt very many companies ship 10,000,000 MP3 players, WMA is even cheaper.



MPEG2 AAC? I though people used MPEG4 AAC . . .



HURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Isn't MP4 a container? that is what allows gapless playback ect...?

MP4 is a container - the mot popular and the standardized one for AAC.
It allows gapless playback, but two conditions (at least) are needed:

- the encoder must store some extra informations (about padding and encoder delay, like mp3 I suppose). FAAC and Nero AAC are doing this, but not iTunes, Winamp or Compaact! (not sure about this last one)
- the decoder must read the informations, in order to remove the additionnal samples. Faad2 is able to do this, but all other decoders ignore them.

Perhaps, had they release AAC first instead of MP3, then AAC will be more popular than MP3.. It is the case of the early bird catches the worm.. The first out in the market gets a decisive advantage.. !

This is not unusual in the world of product development.

How much fo they charge for that? I just noticed that this for sale already. It has also an AAC player.

My N-GaGe plays AAC files perfectly

I use both Nero AAC and iTunes AAC, then copy the files to n-gage via foobar2000 (MP4 utilities -> extract MP4 tracks)

N-gage also can record from the internal radio to AAC.

Remember, these phones only support pure .aac files. They do not support any container format, nor HE-AAC.

My Sony Ericsson P800 also supports .aac (and mp3), but it's better to use OggPlay! with it. I then just transcode everything (from APE) to Vorbis 80kbps (not the best quality, but better than nothing, and i need some space for the apps/games too) and put these on my 128MB memory card, which is ok when i dont have my iPod nearby (i rarely take it with me unless i've "planned" to use it)

Are these problems?

Did i say that? no. But people might think they support mp4/m4a containerformats, which they don't.

That way we don't have to get questions like "but mp4 doesnt playback on my ngage??? i thought it played aac?" and so on.

EDIT:

There are also a few other portables that supports AAC playback, not just the ipod. But it's rarely advertised. the Gem Diva player plays it (no container, no HE-AAC), and a few others.

I see Nokia selling their phones with support for AAC playback, period.

If "people" think those phones support something else, people is wrong

hey, as long as it's good enough to get the tune!

my Philips Exp303 (bought 2002) supports AAC - claims to, has the icon for it, i've never tried. not the mp4 container though *i think*. so some kind of raw AAC only? Philips have dropped support in some newer models sadly, probably for the licence reasons discussed above/lack of demand?

Atlantis, could you be more specific:
Can Nokia play AAC HE files? (Does ".aac only" mean "no AAC HE"?)
Can foobar transcode any audio to Nokia-accepted AAC?

Also waiting for my 6320 with AAC / mp3 support and I don't want to use the Nokia Audio Manager, which is probably the worst ever ripper/encoder/playback-utility. It would have awesome few years back, let's say 1994

N-Gage can play raw LC AAC files.
It means you need to create you files directly in .aac format (example, in nero you have to choose "export ISO 13818-7 AAC track").
Or, as I do, you can save your files as MP4 (nero) or M4A (itunes), then you simply open them with foobar and extract the AAC track stored in the MP4 (i think you need the special installer of fb2k).
For the HE AAC files, n-gage can decode them, but not the SBR-part.



Never installed NAM

Maybe I should replace my 6610 with some newer model playing AAC files.

That looks too weird for me..
N6230 was 409 € from http://www.puhelinkioski.fi pre-ordered. But for music I need a bigger MMC-card than the default 32MB, so it will cost some more.

Define "most poplular" regarding MP4 container.

Don't you think most popular means the one with the most people using it? It seems to me that outside of the few people here, the only people that have even the slightest clue what is AAC is the large iPod community. And they use .m4a container. And they are a lot of people. So maybe .m4a is "most popular"???

Define "standardized"

Based on the other thread of .mp4 vs .m4a, there is no "standard"

That is the problem. This thread is just another example of confusing concept of AAC vs mp4 vs m4a, and now, i don't even know what is HE-AAC.

It is such a fustercluck! No wonder there are no hardware makers to support it...

Meanwhile, Microsoft cleans house with support on every player.

Wake up industry!

Eh, m4a is .mp4 container extension renamed. It's still the same standard.

It seems that you are confused. People in this thread don't necessary have the same problem.

A lot of people are also confused with .cda extension, wav container & extension and PCM informations. But it doesn't mean that CD audio is badly standardized. Confusion is a consequence of isolate initiatives (.cda fictive extension / m4a extension name), and not of gap in the current standard.

Well this sounds plain stupid from Nokia's part. AAC HE would be a huge improvement for mobile flash player as 6230 because you can go under 128 kbps. But if when have to choose between 128 kbps mp3 vs. AAC, I go for mp3 for the simple reason: it is compactible with everything. I'm too old to play the "same standard but differenet file extension" game.

OT: It is idiotic that the extensions isn't .mp4 and cross-compactible with every player and software there is. Every consumer that has had something to do with .mp3 would instantly understand that .mp4 is like mp3 but better. Long live mp3

I'm not sure that's stupidity. I guess that hardware components dedicated to mp4 decoding and supporting HE-AAC need to be released first. And HE-AAC is something very new.

As guruboolez said, HE is a new technology and I believe Nokia started developing and engineering their phones before HE was finalized and developed.

Said that, I think it wouldn't be too difficult to port to Series60 a HE-capable decoder like FAAD2 (if hardware allows it, of course).
If you still need "to go under 128kbps", you can always choose vorbis: there is oggplay.

Yep, Oggplay is for S60. But 6230 is S40 I wonder why all the S60 phones have to be so bulky and awkward for my taste. (Yes, I've tried 7650/3650/6600/N-Gage for 2-4 weeks in daily use.)
(OT: S60 has something even better than Oggplay: C-64 emulator!)