I use Nero frontends to encode AAC files with EAC.
A user on this forum give me this setting:

-profile LC -quality high -vbr normal -artist "%a" -album "%g" -track "%n" -title "%t" -genre "%m" -year "%y" %s %d

Everything is OK with the encoding process but when I loaded the new created AAC files on my iPod I saw that volume level is lower than volume level on mp3 files or than AAC files bought on Apple Music Store. Moreover the sound seem flat and not deep (in Nero AAC files).

So I ask you: is that the best setting i can use to encode AAC files? Which is the best encoding setting to use with Nero Frontends in your opinion?

Yea, I have just now starting dabbling with Nero Frontends tonight. I also noticed the volume being lower. I tried disabling and re-enabling different filters to see if it had any effect on the volume. It seems that either Nero is passing another flag/calling another procedure to do some kind of gain on the track. On the other hand it could be that there is some kind of filter in Nero Frontends that we can't disable, but I'm highly doubting that(since the guy seemed to goto some lengths at all the filter options).

Only thing I know you can do is replaygain the file and hope it can change the true gain values in the file itself, like it can do in mp3 files. Unknown, to me, if this can be done on AAC files.

Main thing I'm hoping is that SBR+PNS is being enabled. Since there seems to be some kind of flags set in the file to let Foobar display it is definately SBR+PNS. If it is just a visual thing, then I don't really care. I hadn't had time to try and listen to see if I could tell a difference. One of the main reasons is because I'm kind of having to do a workaround to get similar bitrate as the Radio:Low setting in Nero. I'm using Tape:Lowest in Nero Frontends, since it is only slightly lower than Radio:Low in Nero.

Here's the parameters I'm using, of course this is for what I want to accomplish. You are going for Higher quality, I'm looking more for keeping the file size low with acceptable quality.

-album "%album%" -artist "%artist%" -title "%title%" -track "%tracknumber%" -genre "%genre%" -year "%date%" -vbr "tape" -profile "HE" -pns -k -nofir -zs %s %d

BTW, this is the parameters in FooBar since I see you are using EAC tags(only difference is how to put the different tag info in).