I just ripped a CD using YME and it gave HE-AAC as one of the options. Just wondering why Winamp is getting all the hype. Though it seems that YME is using Nero AAC.

Maybe because Winamp is waaaay more popular than YME?

Besides, it appears to create higher quality encodes.

Does it do HE-AAC plus PS? That is another reason for all the attention I think. But yeah, like rjamorim just said it's mainly because Winamp is a pretty popular player with the masses.

Winamp gets all the "hype" because it contains a newer CT encoder with parametric stereo. As far as I know YME only has SBR (I'm downloading it now to verify).

Edit: Yep, SBR only. It also associated itself with AAC files despite my unchecking of the "Use as default player" checkbox and sat in the tray consuming RAM. In addition, I wasn't able to find any way of converting songs other than ripping from CD. Most HA members already have their songs ripped, and most who didn't would prefer to use a secure ripping application like EAC. It's therefore not nearly as flexible as the CT encoder included with Winamp, where you can either batch transcode using foobar2000's Diskwriter component or use a GUI utility.

Parametric stereo is supported only till 48 kbps but the file that you are using was encoded at 128. Can you please try with a lower bit rate?

You can't use a bit rate below 56kbps, unless I'm missing an option somewhere.

You were right. I tried various setting and got a bit rate of 32 kbps but foobar still shows the codec profile as just SBR. May be NERO AAC codec does not support PS.

I'm fairly sure the version used in the current YME doesn't have PS support included. We do have PS AAC encoders.