Nov. 18, 2002--Ahead Software, creators of the world-renowned CD/DVD recording software Nero, have announced plans to integrate full MPEG-4 audio support (AAC -- Advanced Audio Coding) within Nero Burning ROM.
Available soon as a downloadable plug-in, the Nero AAC encoder is the result of extensive in-house development work by Ahead in MPEG-4 technology.

Read more here: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_head...11802/223220517

Well, this isn't actually big news for people following this board..

And anyway, the news should read:

"Available soon as a downloadable plug-in, the Nero AAC encoder is the result of extensive in-house development work by Ivan Dimkovic in MPEG-4 technology"

Yeah, i certainly agree, that would be much better John . It's kind of annoying to know that all the glory will go to Ahead in general (soon in all the news sites, like warp2search, neowin, all those) when it's actually Ivan (edit: and Menno's on decoding of course, i'm ashamed ) that are responsible for almost all the work. Not that Ahead isn't great, it sure is.

Hey, it is also Menno's work, too - on decoding..

Ahead is a very good company, certainly among the first ones to incorporate latest technologies. (they were among first to introduce mp3pro, they even support VQF, etc..) - they are members of M4IF and MPEG, too - and expect more and more multimedia hi-tech

I know.
Ok, the news should be:

"Available soon as a downloadable plug-in, the Nero AAC encoder/decoder is the result of extensive in-house development work by Ivan Dimkovic and Menno Bakker in MPEG-4 technology."


I just updated Menno's member title also.

I hope the forthcoming Nero 6 will be more stable than the bughouse 5.5... Oh, the good old 5.0.4.8, solid as a rock...

Quoting the article:


I can't remember the AAC encoder being that fast. Will this be possible at the higher quality settings? And what kind of CPU would you need to reach this level of speedy encoding? P4/AMD Athlon 1,5 GHz+?

There is (were ?) a PsyTEL fastenc, much faster than aacenc.exe
I hope that Nero aac encoding will offer the choice between a fast encoding and the traditionnal slow but HQ encoding.

The Nero encoder is based on aacenc, and, yes, it's a lot faster then any previous version. It will also offer various quality settings (between which there will be some speed difference :-)).

Menno

Will Ahead make it available for free to registered users of Nero or it will have a usage limit like mp3pro plug-in?

Norman

thats not a problem since i have an athlon xp 2200 (well, an athlon xp 1600 overcloced to 2200 speeds so its even faster B) )

Lets hope that new encoder works better in the 96-192kbps range and AAC gets more support. Right now we AAC fans are on expense of a new iriver compatible AAC firmware or just the phillips expanium for portable l337 audio

Maybe a stupid (or condidential) question : any plan for SBR support with aac+ ? Ahead was the first to offer the mp3pro > 64 kb/s encoding. Can we hope an 'aacpro' next ? Did Ivan Dimkovic worked on SBR implementation ?

Norman:

At highest quality settings encoder is 200-250% faster than AACEnc 2.15 (on some configurations even more) - fastest encoding is new 2 - 2.5 times faster than highest quality encoding, so you can figure out the speed

Quality is improved on all bit rates, and especially at lower bit rates (<128 Kb/s), and at highest quality settings results are always better than AACEnc 2.15 - also, PNS algorithm has completely rewritten, and this tool is now finally useful for something

Furthermore, there are 5 speed presets, and several more VBR quality presets. But, stay tuned

Whoops... missed that one. Guess it's time to have some sleep.

Norman

why do it fast , when you can do it right :-)

i vote for a "-slow-as-hell-on-a-8-way-sledgehammer-server-but-quality-as-10-percent-higher-bitrate" switch :-D

Is Menno working for Ahead now too???

Yes. But don't worry. FAAD2 will remain GPL open source.

not even a demo??

Since Ivan works for Ahead at the moment, would it be possible to inform us if the company has any plan on embracing the OGG as well (and even MPC) with on the fly decoding/burning?

Thanks a priori!

PS I'm happy for AAC even though I don't really use it myself. It's a great way to push forward the publicity of a great format.

You read my mind...

Uhm... so Ahead $uckz !

Why Nero doesn't support Vorbis ?

Why does Ahead keep adding support for all these formats that NO ONE uses (WMA, AAC, MP3Pro), but they refuse to add support for Vorbis which already has a nicely sized user base?

What is the source for your claim that "NO ONE" uses AAC, for example - why do you think many incoming VLSI decoder chips will support AAC? Do you know how many companies already have an AAC license?

Well, I do know - and I really don't believe it is a dead format. It has been also implemented on a range of various software and hardware platforms (DSP - fixed and floating point, Motorola, TI, ADSP, TriMedia, etc.., VLSI devices from Toshiba, Sigma, etc.. for example, etc..), not to mention several interoperable implementations.

And, the most of all, it is a international standard, and many companies are offering professional support with their implementations - which is something that might be important to commercial entities.

Now, regarding Vorbis - I do appreciate the format, and I do think it is very good - also, I think that it is one big milestone in audio codec development - but including it in NERO is a decision that is not done by me , and I guess it will need some serious consideration and analysis - also not by me...

I don't think Ahead really refuses to add support. But they have priorities and not everything can be done at once. Imo only recently (from a company point of view) Vorbis has shown that it really is format, which although not a standard, should be taken seriously.

I'm sure WMA has lots of users. Adding VQF support probably wasn't the brightest thing to do, but they eventually did it, because they had bought the licence.

From a hardware and standard -point of view, one could ask similarly, why should Ahead add support for a format that nobody uses (Vorbis).

And AAC has had users much longer time than Vorbis (Liquid Audio, although in wrapped secure format), and some people probably don't even recognaize they are using/will use/have used AAC, because these people are not necessarely interested about technical details. But there are lots of people who definitely have used/use AAC in one form or another and looks very likely will use in the future, considering the coming hardware support and the fact that it's a standard. I suppose you have never checked for examples aac usenet newsgroups. I don't know what's the situation now, but there used to be lots of Liquid users and later Psytel users posting music.

Not to mention that Quicktime 6, with AAC support, is being used by > 25 million people.

Menno

I hope it won't cost too much, I'm just a poor student you know...

(I hope it can be purchased via you instead, so we [or I] can contribute to the right people and not Ahead and its money machine... )

Edit: "Know" not "knpw"...

LOL.. Somehow I suspect that Ivan won't start his own business like that.. Ivan is paid by Ahead and it really is Ivan's interest that the company gets the money..

Now that's something I didn't know yet... This is what e.g. news.tiscali.de has to offer:

alt.aac -20 # news to get if group new
alt.binaries.sounds.aac -20 # news to get if group new
alt.binaries.sounds.aac.d -20 # news to get if group new

But look how "they" treat us again:

microsoft.public.aacme.ignore.this -20 # news to get if group new

By the way, thanks to you and Ivan for not feeding the trolls here again - I had a hard time biting my tongue today...

Well, you never know... Perhaps they want some pocket money?

By the way (a bit offtopic), nice 1337 post...

Woo, big deal.
Now aHead support even more shitty audio formats!! Way to go aHead!!!!!!!!!!
When will we see support for QDesign? Or maybe Vivo Audio? And AHEAD, for gods sake - do NOT forget the über popular RealAudio format. I mean - it has a tremendious userbase.
And what about AIFF, or VOC? And maybe MP2?

where's my OGG Vorbis?

I say this just one time. If you don't know what you are talking about, it's better not to post at all. This is not a thread for Vorbis zealots' ranting.
If you have proper critique that's ok, but that wasn't it.

I really like Nero, but I'd like to see a cmd.line only version, though.
Maybe Ivan could make an aacenc 3 for a moderate amount of money available...

dev0

Sorry John.
I have to practice hiding my disappointment better.

And just when people we were mentioning the trolls...

Seriously Madizone, you can troll all you like on other forums (think iRiver), but HA isn't going to tolerate this kind of thing. I'm getting a bit sick of the continuing zealotry which appears to be seeping into the HA userbase here. People are getting too damn religious about their audio codecs. Part of the whole idea of this place is to promote a greater awareness of all of the various audio encoding choices (because they all have different strengths and weaknesses and are all relevant and "best of class" for some purpose) not to simply provide a battleground for people to flame eachother about how their codec is better and everyone else is stupid or something like that.

Edit:

And btw, I agree that it'd be very cool to see Vorbis support in Nero, but that doesn't make AAC support any less significant.

I have to agree with Dibrom: There were lots of unecessary flame wars initiated by some ignorant users, who declared their audio-format as their religion, in the last couple of weeks. Let's please stop this and go back to serious discussions and not become doom9.
I don't want to sound like some sort of 'elitist', but I (still) see HA as the high quality audio discussion board and center of developments in audiocoding today (shown by the significant amount of devs posting on HA) and would like it to stay what it is.
dev0

Ok, even this is a trolling and not usual posting I might need to comment

First, AIFF is supported by NERO - it is fairly easy to support this kind of format Hehe

MP2, maybe it is "shitty" for you, but it is important for certain applications - and, suprisingly, it has commercial market

AAC, well, you should read http://www.m4if.org/public/documents/vault...4-out-20027.pdf to see what's the catch about, if you wish to take precious trolling time to read something. Yeah, I know.. for many of you the whole MPEG-4 (and MPEG in general) thing (except structured audio coding, which is public domain ! heh, not even GPL but completely PD! ) is "owed" by companies and it SUUXXXX just because it is not freee.. it is lame... not 7337... eh But ok, let me remind you that we don't live in a perfect world ..

Well, even the biggest mobile phone manufacturer supports AAC (Nokia) - they are also morrons.. they are blind.. come on, they could trash 15 years of research and development and immediately switch to god-blessed free solution, all for free.. they even don't need to develop anything. Apple, also... bozos.. Real... they don't know nothing..

Probably the business development managers of companies deciding to support MPEG-4 are idiots... their knowledge is useless.. come on, we could all have free things forever, but unfortunately industry is not a gene copy of Richard Stallman, and sometimes they do rely on international organizations and experts and tend to pay big $$$ just to be sure that everything is ok.. because of something called commertial warranty, and many other things. But hey, this is all corporate bullshit. Don't listen to me.



This has nothing against Vorbis which, from the technical point of view, has a lot to offer to end-users archiving music - but just against ignorant people that just have to have something to "adore" and something to "hate"...

Good Job Guys

I am glad to see aac support in Nero. Congratulations on your success - I believe you guys deserve it. I have not been here long but i have learned a lot. been playing with aac for a couple months and thought it could really go all the way. It did.

here in the states we have satellite radio. xmradio and sirius satellite radio. from what i read they are using aac+sbr (i think - i read it but cannot remember where to confirm - please correct me if i am wrong - thank you). it makes sense to me that when aac is being used at lower bit rates with such clarity that this is the way to go. imagine being able to listen to sat radio and then going home and encoding your favorite album in the same codec you listened to on your radio. i think it will be a big success.

sorry ogg users. most corporations want to cash inflow from their products. i feel the decision to support a particulr codec comes from the board room not the programming
room. so pounding these guys really makes no difference. hopefully they will support it in future versions

my .02 and again CONGRATULATIONS

(edit - added)
i agree Ivan. executive decisions are about the bottom line. codec vs codec comes down to who will shell out the most cash to have whatever supported. the executives run the company to make $$$ the best they can and really don't care what i or anyone else thinks. as long as the shareholders are happy - everyone is smiling (business is business)

Ivan. When I picked "Shitty" I actually made a horrible pick.
Instead I should choose "not very demanded".
Regarding AAC... well, it's fine that they've done 15 years of research - thumbs up.
The problem just is - when I take oggenc.exe and put it against other formats, and then slowly squeeze the bitrate more and more until it becomes audible to me, Ogg Vorbis simply seems most durable.
No other format except mp3PRO can be pushed as much as Ogg Vorbis.

The fact that Ogg Vorbis is opensource seems like a fairly good "warranty" to me...

Whatever - we all have different views...

That was my point - decision inside companies are made consediring the "$" factor

My independent thinking about Vorbis - pretending that I am CEO of some very big corporation - note this has nothing to do with my Company opinion, neither my Company is aware of this purely theoretical speculation, neither my opinion should count in any decision making of any company, as it is a pure speculation!!!

Vorbis Case (from evil big corporation view, not from the user point of view!):

= pros =

1. Open Source
2. Free Implemtation, Free license
3. High quality as reported by users
4. Available documentation
5. Big user base

=cons =

1. Not an international standard, with unclear standardization and development pace and procedures
2. Not implemented in hardware, not supported by any major hardware manufacturer
3. Still with issues on some test files
4. Bit rate management not entirely exact (could be important for some applications)
5. Not officially tested by relevant expert source (independent listening tests, like EBU tests)
6. No commercial guarantee, no paid technical support, no big company supporting it
7. (the big problem) One big corporation stated "FUD" about patent infrigement, even if I do believe this is not the case, big corporations tend to be careful with these kind of issues, and do not want to be the first to taste the wrath of endless number of corporate lawyers
8. User base is not expecting to pay for anything


Etc... - now this is my possible thinking about how big company sees the format, and it might be completely untrue - I am also against this kind of thinking, and I do not agree, as a codec developer and researcher - but the thing with industry is somewhat different

Hmm...
The last time I played around with aacenc's cbr mode...
<insert rant about Ivan's defintion/implementation of cbr>

very good Ivan

but from what i have seen about "project x". the ceo doesn't go into that kind of detail. someone else does all the leg work via different departments. there is a feasability study done - to see if it can be implemented at all. then into databases and try to determine the user population - how many and of what demographics. cost analysis - what would it cost to implement "project x". various rates of return on "project x". every company has a minimum cost for their money (irr). this is just a short list. it is not just "implemented". the decision to implement aac occured at least at last years capital budget meetings. things don't just happen over night they are planned sometimes for even 3 to 5 years.

i know this has gone off topic - but for the upset ogg users that didn't get ogg this time please be easy on ahead and especially on ivan and menno. they are making this exceptional codec even better it is not their fault that nero chose acc instead of ogg

thanks again for all the time and effort on acc

Agree - and my "CEO" thinking was of course lacking much more detail - for example, strategic management usually does lots of research and case studies before using something.

So - to conclude, picking a solution is not a one-day work - it takes months of analysis. Yes, there are fast people who try to be the first in everything, but that has its cost and it also has possible dangers. It is not a sin if someone waits to see clearer market situation.

good job ivan

i just wanted to show the upset ogg users that it is not an "overnight" thing.

should we change the url at the bottom of your page from psytel to ahead??

Ivan, is there any possibility of SBR finding it's way into Ahead's AAC implementation?

Now, this is something that I can't really talk about - because SBR is still not an "official" part of MPEG-4. Only thing I could say is that Ahead will always include latest developments in all relevant industry fields.

regardless of lacking support for eg. MPC & Ogg it's nice to see AAC getting this support by Ahead, a quite impressive company.
I don't see why MPC/Ogg OTF decoding should be difficult, the piping functions aren't very complicated and should require much work, but bundling is another thing. Importing the decoding executables into the main application dir and let users enjoy OTF decoding should be OK

note!
EAC will support OTF decoding with next release (it already does, but Andre did for example customize this for old MPC)
I'll test a version soon and see how it works with all the updates (no, it's not an official download)

cheerzors:
David

Personally speaking I'm more worried about how a medium neutral user recieves this kind of attitude from some of the OGG supporters (...better say zealots), than if the format will be supported by Nero (cause it will sooner or later). Some people with such childish behavior manage to make an entire format look unattractive, cause lack of logical arguments and civilized response forces some to avoid even taking the trouble to check if OGG is worthwhile or not...

Even though I use OGG more than anything else, I hate it when I face such narrow-mindness regardless its origins...

[EDIT] Bluewer than blue: read this: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....t=ST&f=8&t=4431

Ivan,



I think you have point there though...

There's a question I have: Will Nero produce .AAC files or QT6 compatible .MP4 files?