I have recently switched over from compressing my music collection in mp3 format to AAC. I've noticed burps and gaps in the audio during playback of files encoded with Nero AAC. I feel certain that these errors were encoded into the file, even though the original .wav did not have these errors. I'm using the medium bitrate preset, which is something around 160-200 kbps VBR. Can anyone suggest what may be wrong with the settings or encoder? I have also used Compaact and noticed none of these errors.

--Acro

You will need to be more specific.
It is very unlikely that "burps and gaps" are caused by encoding. From mine experience (and I've been working on AAC development for couple of years) Nero's AAC is one of the best AAC encoders available (if not THE best). Your problem is probably somewhere else in the ripp-encode-decode-play chain.
So, please state the apps you used, encoder version, input samples, settings you used for encoding, decoder you used for playback, etc... Than you can hope for a reasonable explanation.
As I said, it is very unlikely, but you never know - maybe you nailed a bug!

Daniel

Not directly related but I've had nero's aac encoder crash on certain files. It is not a random crash as it is 100% reproducable. I have even sent these files to Nero support and after MONTHS of re-stating the problem a MILLION times they concluded that my file was at fault. Afterwards, I found more files that crashed the encoder. But whatever, I'm not going to spend another half a year to have them tell me this file has problems too Furthermore, it was tied to a specific encoding setting and could easily be avoided by changing something (though annoying because it reduces consistency across my library).

Oh yeah, it wasn't tied to the specific file because I could re-encode it into other formats and it will still crash in the same spot.

Can you post one of these files or a part of it in the upload forum and a description of how to reproduce it? (Assuming it still happens with the latest encoder)

Turns out Dand was right.
The files I was having trouble with were several from Bob Marley and the Wailers Gold album. At the time of my original post, I had listened to them with ITunes. Now, reviewing with Foobar, there are fewer of the aforementioned errors in playback. So, new question: does ITunes have difficulties supporting high bitrate AAC? The files were encoded with Nero 6.08 VBR at medium quality preset with .mp4 extension. Also, I ripped using EAC, so the integrity should have been good.

This is starting to sound much more like a problem with your playback chain than with AAC...I doubt iTunes has such bugs in playback.

I found a track like that the other day, "If Only I Could Flag Her Down" on the album Eliminator by ZZ Top. See http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=33714

If the encoder crashes it's a bug, regardless of whether the input is a valid WAV file or garbage.


-- M

Please use Nero for encoding, aacenc32 is an unsupported frontend not made by us.

If that still causes crashes I would very much like to obtain a sample or the track that reproduces this.