Hello all,

Quicktime 7 is capable of VBR AAC. It would make sense, since we have no tests of Apple vs Nero on multiple kinds of music, or of this new encoder, that we run new tests. (Thank you guruboolez for your tests, but I'm itching to see what Quicktime 7 can do)

If someone has already tested it, or has plans to, please post.

I would ABX the encoders myself (everyone's ears are different), but I am limited with awful equipment at the moment (laptop speakers), and therefore won't hear many differences.

Thanks,
Tropican

What bitrate are you after? I'd be willing to make some samples.

I'd like to test the new VBR peformance for a long time. I need time to it, but I'll have a lot in ~6 weeks. But as long as QT7 is not available for Windows, I can't/don't want testing it.

Should this wait until we have the finalized Nero 3.x.x.x encoder?

That would make it more interesting, yes. The next iTunes is some 60 days away anyways.

Perhaps it would be useful to have LAME 3.97 included as a benchmark?

@Busemann, Is that a hint that the new Nero AAC encoding engine will be done soon?

Not really.. Better ask the Nero guys around here for an update.

Yeah I forgot to add, I don't have a Mac to test it on either. Guruboolez I was hoping that you would be as interested in this new encoder as I was. I was aiming at a bitrate around 128-160 (which I tend to use) or what most of this board would probably want, something closer to --preset standard in Lame. I was thinking someome could to an informal test now (A few killer samples, a few normal ones), and then when the Nero 3 encoder, Itunes 5, and Lame 3.97 come out we could have a serious shoot-out. As an Anchor I thought we could use the Previous versions of those encoders. An anchor for the smaller, informal test could be FAAC or Psytel.

What does everyone think?

I did last summer a listening test at ~175 kbps, and my wish is to perform another test including an AAC encoder. It's only a wish, and I'm not sure that I will spent my free time to do it. But VBR or not VBR, the situation for Apple's encoder is still the same: without real gapless playback, I don't consider Apple's AAC encoder as a proper solution for high-bitrate encodings. There are too much discs in my library which need gapless playback. If I had to use an AAC encoder instead of MPC or Vorbis, it would be either faac or Nero AAC (I guess it will be Nero). Nevertheless, I'm curious, and I didn't exclude the possibility to oppose one day Nero & Apple AAC encoders at high bitrate.

Not having gapless does tend to spoil things

I still wonder how the QT encoder measures to its hype. QT AVC was a real disappointment to me based on the sample encodes posted here. It seems Nero is close to winning the war for a complete MPEG-4 solution. (Audio + Video)

Better to FLAC now, transcode later...

Well, the windows version is out. Anyone checked it out yet?