In February, a significany update to the Nero AAC encoder was discussed for the end of April. July approaches and still no major update. Is there a revised timeline for this? Thank you in advance for any information.

The update I speak of is the reduction in file sizes on the pre-sets. There was an update in early February that made the transparent settings balloon in size to comparable to LAME APS.

There will be an update with at least PS and possibly DSBR, soon. The high bitrate tuning are not finished yet - we had to tune PS/DSBR, and this caused some delay.

what does this mean? you guys also tunned higher bitrates?? i personally use transparent preset since i want the best quality-size tradeoff (well, a bit more quality actualy). Im about to encode my whole cd collection to transparent preset, should i wait for the update??

Same question here

I would wait. Otherwise, you gain almost no advantage in file size over LAME MP3 APS. You may as well stick with that - transparent and plays on every device.

Apple AAC 192 does a really good job if you cannot wait. The Nero team is great though - just give them a bit more time.

I would also wait for the update. I have encoded few albums with Transparent preset, and got nasty artifacts with couple of songs. With computer music mostly (Psycho trance and Hard Trance) and less problems with metal rock.

what i want to know if they at least will tune transparent preset, if they dont theres no point of waiting for high quality presets, otoh, dvd backups would benefit from heaac and ps tuning... so any official feedback??

Everybody should note that just because the profile is called transparent, doesn't mean that this is where transperency lies for you. Through my personal abx testing I have discovered that using the streaming profle, I cannot consistantly abx samples from the original. The streaming profile has an aveage bitrate of 150kbps based on the 1000 odd songs I have encoded with it thus far.

I would suggest you do your own abx testing with a variety of samples from your own music collection to see which profile suits you best.

The same here. But there is one more problem: probably you have a friends
And while I (person with a very regular hearing) usually can not distinquish ~128Kbit aac from original, they possibly can.
It would be a bit confusing, if your neigbour come to you and after two drinks ask, where you downloaded such a crap, may be it was edonkey ?
So, IMHO it is safer to use settings that are probably near-transparent for a most of people...

Based on Roberto's last 128kbps test, I find it unlikely that anybody could pick most tracks encoded in QuickTime AAC at 128kbps as lossy encoded material without having heard the original. QuickTime AAC's rating was 4.26, which is pretty damn close to transperent. And this decided (on the most part, I assume) by people comparing lossy encoded tracks to the originals, in a quiet environment, with head phones. So again, I find it unlikely (even in a quiet environment), that most people would be able to pick a QuickTime AAC 128kbps encoded tracks as a lossy encoded file. Not saying it couldn't happen, but I think it's unlikely.

Yeah, you are probably right.
BTW, yesterday evening I receive one confirmation on your point - one old friend of mine was my guest and I gave him ABC/HR, headphones and couple of ~72Kbit HE AAC (that last VBR profile of NERO) songs. And he could not distinquish them from original...
It looks like a punisment for my previous post

In my (limited) experience people who haven't done any ABXing before often can not do it well. It takes practice. I'm not suprised by your friends result. I remember when I first started about a year ago, I couldn't ABX anything.

Think best way to get use to ABX'ing is get one of those problem samples and listen til you hear the difference between it and original(it's better to listen to shorter samples, cause just picking the problems out of a 3+ min song is a little hard for the newbie). After you listen to a few different ones, you can kind of figure out what to look for.


***Edited Part***
Make sure to think about it long and hard before attempting to do this though. After you have got to the point where you can determine the problems between original and lossy then it gets harder for you to accept lower bitrate stuff....


Blue or Red Pill?