Someone knows when will be these players available...?

Regards!

Yes portable players playing back all Nero Digital formats would be great (including the just announced new MPEG 4 Audio Parametric Stereo Extension format).

Unfortunately I haven't seen one company license anything from Nero Digital in the approximately 1 year since Nero Digital came out.

Yes, they use Nero Digital in the Nero 6 line of products, but I have been waiting for a standalone software player (so people don't have to buy Nero 6 to do HE AAC audio playback/encoding) sold by Nero or someone else using their Nero Digital MPEG 4 (HE AAC) codecs and have seen nothing. Does anyone know of a company who has licensed and is using Nero Digital MPEG 4 Audio codecs in their products (hardware and/or software)?

NeroDigital is our implementation of the MPEG4 standard. Anything that supports the MPEG4 standard will also handle NeroDigital content.

What differs is how far, e.g. HE-AAC is not that widely supported (but can be played back in somewhat lower quality by any AAC decoder anyway), and PS-AAC is almost not supported (well, we didn't even release encoder publicly yet! And normal AAC decoders can play back PS-AAC too, just in mono).

With NeroDigital we provide a suite of high performance codecs that support the latest standards. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), anybody can do an implementation of MPEG4.

Because of this, LC-AAC can be played back by the iPod, HE-AAC is supported by some players, MPEG4 Video is supported by some standalones, and for example the 3ivx filter suite (apparently) supports MPEG4 video and HE-AAC audio decoding (it appears to be free too, so a good standalone software player solution). You can also use for example Media Player Classic+ffdshow for MPEG4 video and audio decoding.

So, what I'm basically saying, MPEG4 is an open standard. If you use NeroDigital, you are not locked in to use our software for decoding.

Garf,

When did you start working at Ahead/Nero? I thought you were an Ogg Vorbis stalwart... Thanks for the reply though. Any chance of Nero releasing a standalone HE ACC/AAC LC encoder app for sale (and also perhaps an audio player app)?

With RealPlayer 10 Gold now playing back HE AAC files, there needs to be a good standalone (not just part of a CD burning suite) HE AAC encoding app available for sale IMO. Don't you agree? I don't want to mess with Helix as it hasn't paid the patents for HE AAC encoding, etc. I want a fully legal commercial HE AAC standalone encoder app.

P.S. I like Nero 6, but it would be nice to just own the encoder portion, for many people who don't need the Video and CD burning features... Also a commercial Adobe Audition plugin with HE AAC and AAC LC encoding (patent licensing paid) would be nice from Ahead/Nero also. That would help spread more overall adaptation of HE AAC MPEG 4 Audio, as would a standalone HE AAC encoder app.

I joined Ahead approx. 2 months ago. They were looking for more people to work on MPEG4 and I was getting fed up with Vorbis (non)development, so it was a very good match, and I am enjoying my new job a lot



3 things:

1) The Nero suite is already quite cheap, especially since you get so much for it, so I wonder what pricing we'd have to aim at. For example, compactaac! sells for 20 Euros. The Nero suite is 60 Euros but includes in total at least 15 applications, and I still haven't counted the AAC encoder then...

2) We already try to spread adoption of HE (and soon PS) AAC by giving away decoder sources for free (under GPL). FAAD 2 is a first class decoder including fixed point support and all the new standards.

HE-AAC standalone decoders are already available, for example foobar2000 includes HE and PS-AAC decoding in the core. You can get HE-AAC plugins for Winamp too, all for free.

3) I don't get to decide what we sell and for how much, I just make sure what we sell is very good However, the 'people in charge' do certainly listen to what customers want, so there is certainly a possibility that this might happen.

Thanks for the reply Garf. Very informative. Glad to hear you're happy at Ahead/Nero and working with Ivan, Menno and others to help advance MPEG 4 Audio.

The original poster wanted portable player support. I know of no portable player with HE AAC playback support. Perhaps if we encourage more HE AAC and AAC LC files out there "in the wild" by Ahead putting out a full featured HE AAC/AAC LC encoder that makes M4A/MP4 files, this would help a lot.

The more people and websites that use M4A/MP4 audio files (both AAC LC and HE AAC), the liklier hardware manufacturers will finally support both of these wonderful versions of the MPEG 4 Audio format in their portable players..

Having a good standalone encoder (and Adobe Audition encoder/decoder commercial plug-in) will help get the Radio and Movie pros onboard to encourage more producing of content. I doubt many radio engineers/movie designers would use a CD burning app to make/convert their audios, but putting out a standalone encoder would help get an "inroad" into this untapped market and further help legitimize Nero 6. It would also likely help to increase Nero 6's sales with the wider exposure that a standalone encoder would bring, as people may want "more features" and would probably upgrade to the full Nero 6.

Maybe you could help the decision makers at Nero become exposed to this idea and also perhaps the marketing guys/gals will come onbard for this...

as garf said the nice thing with an open standard, like mpeg-4, is that you are not locked to the decisions of 1 company (as its the case with wma)

afaik some siemens mobiles support he-aac playback already, have a look at the audiocoding.com forum, hans-jürgen posted some info about this there

http://faac.sourceforge.net/phorum/read.php?f=2&i=15&t=15

O2 Digital Music Player. Apparently you can also buy music in HE-AAC.

The O2 Digital Music Player supposedly also supports HE AAC
http://www.o2.co.uk/o2-digital-music-player.html

I think I read that at Audiocoding once. I can't find any information about supported formats on their site.

It supports MP3, AAC and AACPlus.

Problem is that u have to be a customer of the O2 mobile network.

Regards!

Well, i'm lookin 4 HW players, Not SW.

It seems only O2 DMP can play AAC-HE [.aac ISO 13818-7 container] at this very moment.

Does anyone know if when will be Nero Digital Portable Players available...?

U can see this on Nero Digital Site:
In addition, Nero Digital will soon be available on such consumer electronics as handheld devices, portable CD/DVD players, etc. Look out for the Nero Digital logo

So, i guess they may be soon available.........I'm nerviously expecting!

Regards!

Still looookin 4...

Anybody knows when could be available...?

Regards!

...Or anyone know of any firmware hacks for existing players. I have been wanting a music server like netgears MP101 but all those only support mp3 and/or wma. I'm surprised I havent heard of any hacks.

Note: You will not be able to play downloaded tracks on your PC.

what does this mean? downloaded files are drmed???