The AAC forum seems to be the only one without the "Recommended AAC encoder and settings" stickies. Why is that?

From reading the posts, it seems most people use the Nero encoder, so is that the recommended one? But, according to the published listening tests, the iTunes / Quicktime encoders were said to have slightly beaten the Nero encoder. So is that the recommended one? And what about settings?

I know, I know - people should conduct there own listening tests and determine for themselves which encoder and settings work best for them, blah blah. But, that said, the other forums still have the "Recommended encoder and settings" sticky so I was just wondering why the AAC forum does not? Is it still too new of a format to really commit to any one encoder and/or settings? Just wondering.

QuickTime, at least the 6.4 version, IIRC, should be best at high bit rates, but it doesn't support VBR. Nero's advantages are VBR and HE-AAC for low bit rates.

Given that QuickTime is the "unofficial" recommended encoder, what, in your opinion would you say would be the "unofficial" recommended settings to use? Not necessarily bitrate, but more along the lines of those "good, better, best" options in QuickTime.

I've read that "best" offers no better quality than "better" for normal CDs because it is optimized for 24-bit and CDs are only 16-bit anyway (not that I know what that really even means) but is that statement 100% true? Or are there some cases where "best" can produce theoretically better results than "better" with a 16-bit CD?

As far as "unofficial" recommended bitrates for AAC, would it be fair to say:

160 = for portable players (i.e. equiv to LAME --alt-preset standard -Y)
192 = very high quality (transparent for most people for most songs) (i.e. --alt-preset standard)
224 = very very high quality (i.e. alt-preset extreme)
320 = highest possible quality (i.e. alt-preset insane)

If someone made Nero AAC guide & FAQ's it would be made a sticky.

Keep in mind these are just MY ears opinion. In order to not violate TOS #8, I wish to state that these are my experiences only and do not represent statistical listening tests.



Yes. I have not bothered with any setting over AAC QT 192 because its transparent to me. I think you may be suprised at how strong AAC QT 128 is, unless you have great hearing and/or great headphones. On an iPod with standard ear buds, I challenge you to ABX 128 from 192. I encode everything with Apple Lossless for archival but am now using AAC QT 128 almost exclusively on my portable. I was previously using AAC QT 192 and MP3 LAME APS.

I have not read in this forum of anyone using any AAC QT setting over 224.

For the record, I am a long time MP3 LAME APS user and have my ears attuned (as much as they can be for me) to this setting.

Hope this helps.

I and a few other members had a growing document in the wiki that listed all the AAC encoders that we know to exist. I had started a FAQ section as well that semi-dealt with the question of what encoder to use, recommended bitrate, etc. However, you can't read it because the wiki is still offline.

could upload it to here

Just for the record, the wiki really will be back soon now (as in maybe in the next day or two)

The only reason it's still offline at the moment is because of some performance issues. I want to get things running a little more smoothly speed wise before I open the site back up to a lot of traffic. It's really a pain in the ass for everyone if I have to fix things after the fact.

I don't think the situation is as clear cut as it is with LAME.

No one is quite sure if Nero is better then iTunes or if its the other way around. Furthermore since Nero isn't free, iTunes doesn't have VBR or a command line interface and neither is available like FAAC in a plain executable, which one is recommended is going to vary widely depending on what a user wants to do . . .

If iTunes/QuickTime really starts offering VBR and multichannel in their next release, I think it'll become a killer encoder for mid-high bitrates. Highest quality, free, a pleasing and easy to use interface...

I concur. I think VBR is definitely a must in the next release. And yes, the best thing is that it's free, which always brings a smile to my face.

As long as it's not gapless, many people including myself consider it completely useless. And since their playback software/hardware can't even play their own lossless codec gaplessly, it's unlikely that they would bother making their AAC encoder gapless.

There might be many people that demand gapless, but I don't think it's a huge number. Most people lived happily with MP3 for years, even though they didn't had gapless playback then either unless they used ugly hacks supported in a handful of players.

Also, it also has an unique feature not available in the competition (Nero): SoundCheck. While it might not be as good as ReplayGain, it's as close to it as you can get with an AAC encoder.

Pick your poison.

Thanks for all your work.

This confuses me somewhat.. Is SoundCheck a feature of the format or the encoder in some way? I mean, for all of that matter, you could apply WavGain to the sound before you encoded it.

As far as I know, iTunes only stores the SoundCheck information in tags, not by actually modifying the raw audio data itself. I admit I may be wrong on that one.

But I think that the player has to support SoundCheck to be able to do it, in other words. The only players that do are iTunes and the iPod. And we can convert ReplayGain info for use with the iPod's SoundCheck feature.

Just out of curiosity, what factors are considered when trying to decide on an "official" recommendation? Is it strictly just quality (i.e. if encoder XYZ had better (or would it be worse?) ABX scores than encoder ABC, then the recommendation should be XYZ. End of story)? Or are other factors such as ease of use, cost, etc. also factored in?

I'm of the opinion that it should be based strictly on quality except in very special cases (i.e. if encoder XYZ costs $1000 and encoder ABC is free and had quality that was extremely close to XYZ).

However, assuming that it is based strictly on quality, are ABX scores the only factor in determining quality? Just an example: What if it were the case that 100 different samples were tested and Nero won on 75 of them but people said that, on those 75 samples, they both sounded very similar but iTunes just sounded a bit flatter and that's how they were able to ABX them. But, let's say, on the other 25 samples that Nero totally bombed and there were very audible clicks, pops, static, artificact, or whatever. Would this (i.e. totally bombing on certain samples) come into play at all or would it be based strictly on the numbers (i.e. 75% vs. 25%)?

PS. Yeah, I know I'm getting a little nuts here but I'm just trying to think about the best way to do it.

two of the main factors that I looked at when considering AAC encoders were cost and options. Nero costs too much in my opinion just for the encoder; no need to upgrade from Nero 5.5.10 when it serves me fine (I hardly use it now in any event) and piracy is too much of hassle, not to mention the legal aspects.
Compaact! gave me the VBR options that were missing in the free choices at a very reasonable price and works with the Foobar2k diskwriter. It also had the excellent low bitrate encoding that I wanted for my audio website.
I can understand why people choose Nero, just not interested in buying a bulky burning program that I would never use only for the audio encoder.

I'm not so sure about the validity of that statement any more. I used to not really care; the little gaps were just little ones, didn't really distract from my music listening experience, etc.

Now that I've experienced Vorbis and Musepack, the gaps in between poorly-encoded rips is downright aggravating. I'm sure that there are a lot of peopel out there that really enjoy their music that would find proper gapless encoding of live albums for example to be a major boon. It just needs to be marketed as such. Apple knows how to market, so if they could aim for and hit that market, they'd stand to gain even more ground. On top of that, they would show that they're technologically hip as well as being able to market a product.

You can do SoundCheck with Nero/FAAC/LAME/whatever via foobar (and it uses Replaygain for the actual calculations), so i wouldn't call that an advantage of Quicktime. Rather its an advantage of iTunes and foobar over other audio players.

I'm all for gapless. I understand iTunes is a very good encoder but im waiting for the garf & friends to finish tuning nencode so i can put my classical music and opera as aac.

Opera & Concerts without gapless = bleagh

... I also seem to have developed an allergy to CBR.. I wonder why - could be all my messing about with video encoders, gives you very... visual clues about what CBR does to data (OMG! As soon as I move everything goes really blurry! I think I might be ill!).

QuickTime is free which is great - even tho I use K-Lite Codec Pack's QuickTimeAlternative (which has no pesky applications, only the codecs, and still works with the windows port of Escape Velocity Nova) - but it wont be my aac encoder of choice for a while.

If Apple - which i love, I started on macs (a 22Mhz 68040LC processor anyone?) and I'd buy one right now if i had the cash - put gapless and vbr in QT I'll consider it (and it seems that vbr is in the pipe at least). Till then it's nero for me. Since I need it to write my dvd backups 'n stuff it actually works out quite cheap in the end.

JT

VBR is a totally different beast than CBR. It's very very early to say "highest quality" about it without hearing even a beat yet.. It can easily fail more often than CBR.
If we'd be precise, you violated ToS #8 by saying something which is not yet released and still untested is highest quality..

lol... omg, so even speculation is out the window now here, huh?

i'd hate to post my hopeful opinions about musepack 1.2, then


later

What speculation? I didn't see any speculation, just "Highest quality".
Where is the speculation in that?

Erm.. it is already highest quality at CBR. Even if they fuck up badly and mess up VBR completely, what I find unlikely, they will still be offering a CBR mode better than the competition, be the competition VBR or CBR.

You were talking about VBR, multichannel and mid-high bitrates. Although only 128kbps has been tested with blind group listening test.

Precisely! Besides getting highest quality CBR encoding at 128kbps (and surrounding bitrates, probably), you will get VBR, multichannel, etc.

And all this for free.

This isn't what you said at first, but good thing that you at least specified now.
Yeah, nice, but you sound like TV-shop..

Why? Just because Nero is very expensive for an AAC encoder alone?

?
I haven't even mentioned Nero in this thread.

Just lets wait and see first, until the next QT is actually released before starting the fanfares.

"Please don't feed the trolls"

Why, sorry Garf. I didn't mean to hurt

i am pretty sure that apple will offer multichannel, as it seems to be their main audio codec now and people will also want to enjoy audio when they encode movies with apples avc codec

of course maybe they will not make multichannel available in itunes ("music only", but only in quicktime -> not for free anymore