sweet jesus!

it's a miracle!

thanks

To bb:

Wow. Much respect directed at you for that post, bro.

I am also settling in for a nice evening (and possibly weekend--about 200GB of FLAC to go through) of encoding.

We should do e-coffee.

Well, here is the deal - this is why we released this 'prosumer' hi-end encoding solution. We do not want to limit people in any way with this encoder as long they use this tool for their personal content encodings, and for strictly non-comercial use - if they wish to use 2-pass, and/or have a need to do so - so be it.

This is not a product for novices, this is a product for people that know exactly what they want to accomplish. Of course, our quality settings are optimized to give best quality for a given bit-rate / quality levels, but it is up to the user to decide what size he wants, and what additional methods he would wish to use in the process (e.g. 2-pass, optimizing for streaming, etc...)

As far as the platform support goes - Win32 was the immediate target. Linux will follow shortly.

As for OS-X - this is something we will definitely think about.

Cool, and thanks. I'm on IRC (EFnet) almost constantly with this nick of mine or YIM at: br0adband_2003 so look me up sometime. I'm on the way out the door now to demo a pair of Shure E3c's for this iPod, can't buy 'em tonight but I've never heard anything bad about 'em so we'll see what happens.

Ivan: Thanks again for the efforts you and your friends are creating.

bb

This is a very exciting bit of news! I've just read through the entire thread, but there are still a few points from the announcement/download page on which I am unclear (see the bold text quoted below):

Any hints on how these features are implemented, and how to instruct the program to use them? If they function as advertised, this is exactly the sort of command-line codec that feeds my fantasies... but as others have previously noted, running the program with -help is not (yet) very helpful.

Also, I am sure someone is working on a dedicated frontend (isn't that the inevitable outcome?), but I've still seen no mention of one. Did I miss it?

Congratulations on the launch of what is sure to become a popular command-line encoder! Very much looking forward to following the progress of this one.

- M.

I will post information about these features soon.

Well for me, I just ripped about 150 songs at random from one of my FLAC backup DVDs, encoded with foobar2k 0.9.1 and the Nero encoder, loaded the songs into my iTunes library, added the album artwork, then updated the iPod. Not one issue and it sounds great. YMMV, however.

I'm sure in time a GUI frontend will appear (I bet someone's already working on it, perhaps Ivan and the gang themselves <hint, hint>). But definitely, great news all around.

bb

Thank you.

- M.

Today new 128 kbit/s listening test started at SoundExpert. Going to add this precious gift from Nero to the test. Still not decided what mode to choose:

1. “-q X.XX” and manually target 128 kbit/s or
2. “2-pass” and let encoder make it automatically.

Or may be to wait a little bit for some possible bugs discovered/fixed?

We call ours Nero Burning ROM.

Don't know if your conditions permit - but it might make sense to include VBR, ABR and 2-pass modes in the test, just to see how they perform against each other... or at least 2 of them.

"Conditions permit". What modes you recommend?

Britney Spears comes out as Britney Spears as i've tried hahah. But just the bitrate is a lil lower than a 1pass encoding. And my ears arent good enuf to tell the difference between 1or2 passes.



If linux will follow than a port to darwin/osx shoudlnt be too far off right?

Great !! Can't wait to try it

Sounds really promising, wish I could give it a try. How long till the UNIX version? Can you elaborate on that?
Thanks a lot for the generous offer.

In what way do I encode using Nero ?

ВTW, when will be a binary for Athlon XP users available ?
Thanks

Either

1 Nero Month.

or

When it's done

now, how cool is that!

some examples for noobs:
quality based:
neroaacenc -lc -q 0.5 -if file.wav -of file_q05.mp4

bitrate based:
vbr
neroaacenc -lc -br 131072 -if file.wav -of file_br128.mp4
cbr
neroaacenc -lc -cbr 131072 -if file.wav -of file_cbr128.mp4

(the play fine in faac based players (fb2k, mplayer) and also in real player.)

edit: 'mp4box -isma file.mp4' makes them work in qt7 as well.

Actually, it works fine through Wine...



but, I'm waiting also the Linux version.

That's what I love about you Garf... you've got a wonderful sense of humor.

Not to knock Nero Burning Rom - it's a great program. It just isn't the great program for me. My retail copy (yes, as in "purchased") didn't get used very much, as I generally burn ISO images from the command-line and audio from EAC. So I uninstalled it.

If a command-line version and/or a small-footprint GUI are available instead, I am more likely to make extensive use of the encoder. Either way I'm looking forward to experimenting with it.

Cheers,
- M.

The Chapter support works with foobar2000 0.9.1's converter. Just choose the output function "convert to album images with cuesheet or chapters". I tested this feature already. I tried to use Mp3tag to add album art, but it erased some of the tags. Not sure if it's a setting that I have wrong or if Mp3tag 2.35 and foobar2000 0.9.1 have incompatible implementations of MP4 tagging.

@ Nero Developers: Keep up the good work. Excellent to see a tool like this released. I prefer the command line to the old implementation very much, and I don't think I'm alone.

EDIT: Oops quoted the wrong person.

i just tested on a friend's computer and found something strange that was easily reproduceable
i was able to encode chord.wav (the one that comes bundled with windoze) using any value 0 <= and >= 0.6 but with any value >= 0.6 i got this message:


and a question: to hit a desired file size using 2 pass i just have to find out what bitrate would give me that size for that length and use this bitrate with neroaacenc right?

tia

I have an old P3 box and cannot try this surprising aac coder in the first time.

Will it be a normal version that can be running even on an older one, like P2? For me, a mmx & sse (no mmx ext.) optimized version is all I want to get.

I believe Ivan said they are rls a non SSE soon, because a lot of AMD Athlon XP users were exp bugs.

I have succesfully tested it under Windows 2000 on a Pentium M ThinkPad. I have added configuration option for MAREO 3.3.

It works perfect, even if you can't see any progress till it finished.

MAREO can be downloaded from here: http://www.webearce.com.ar/mareo.rar

Just to make sure, there are no tagin options right?

PS: maybe it was overlooked, so,

A little comment, why not use ISO date format for the filename?

NeroDigitalAudio_050106.zip is 2006-05-01, or 2006-01-05? NeroDigitalAudio_yyyy-mm-dd.zip is much better

Ivan:

What exactly does the option "-2passperiod" mean and how does it may affect the quality of encoded file? I guess the default, i.e., zero, is recommended right?

Since this encoder is for professionals, someone may be curious with all possibilities it can produce out.

It's because the file has a 22kHz samplingrate.





Yes.

The encoder crashes on my nForce2/Athlon XP (Barton) workstation but works well on my Acer Ferrari 4005 with ATI chipset and Turion 64. Does anybody else have problems with this release (050106) on the XP platform?

On my Athlon XP I can't even see the switches by entering neroAacEnc.exe -help before I get a window popping up saying: neroAacEnc.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

/Kef

Nero AAC devs,

Let me say also say, "Awesome work!"

A64 3000+, FB2K 0.9.1, converted image+cue to MP4 with chapters, 13.6x

It's already been stated many times that the encoder currently requires support for sse2 instructions which isn't available in athlon xp's, pentium threes and older machines.

Sorry, my bad, but I didn't see any information about the SSE2 requirements on the download page or in the archive. Maybe it would be a good idea to do a SSE2 check and and display a proper error message that SSE2 is required to avoid confusion in the future.

You mentioned a linux version was in the works, does this mean an OS X version would be possible as well?

I would recommend:

- Nero ABR (-br 128000)
- Nero 2-Pass (-br 128000 -2pass)
- Nero Quality VBR (-q 0.425)



Code is itself cross-platform so everything is possible - but it needs time, right?

New encoder is up - SSE2 problem is fixed.

And there's some duplication in the zip making it ~ 2Meg.

There are two versions of the encoder in the package - one with SSE2 instructions, and one without.

It isn't really that hard to make the encoder to check processor's capabilities on runtime and adjust as required. Unless you are just using some compiler optimisations.

Thanks!

.. why are there 4 encoders in the .zip file?

(rhetorical question, just trying to avoid confusion and save you 1MB bandwidth per click )

Cool
Thanks !
Start playing...

This is what I meant:

Should be fixed by now

ok, no more crashes now
works nice in foobar 0.8.3 (with -ignorelength switch), tagging is no problem also. just make sure you select the "default" tag option

encoding speed is 8-9x on a Barton 2 GHz and the non-SSE2 version

the default quality (-q 0.5) gives around 160k for rock music which is exactly what I was looking for (--preset fast medium user here)

the lowpass at q 0.5 looks like a 18 KHz hard cutoff

very promising, to say the least

Thanks!

Ivan what about "-2passperiod" option. And did i can use 2pass with VBR

-2passperiod -> this option allows you to average to specific bit-rate over certain period of time. Value is in milliseconds (so 1000 means 1 second)

For example, if you have a 120 minute track, and you used 2-pass you can average to, e.g. 128 kbps at every 5 minutes, etc...

By default, average period is the entire duration of the encoding.



Please use 2pass with -br switch.

OK then

I am now tested everything in new encoder i think is everything right.

5.1 encoding is SUPERB aslo i tested 2pass which make 5.1 encoding INSANE quality.

Hmm, reading the posts here I would suggest disabling the pure vbr+2pass combination by next chance.

I don't know exactly how it works, but in my imagination it's like going through 2 psychoaccoustic analyses, which is rather counterproductive. Unless the second run is pure quantization, it would be a little like re-encoding, or am I wrong?

There will be a lot of new speedups in 2-pass encoding in the future, as there is definitely a room for that.

Yes, being fully MPEG-4 compliant it would work fine with any external muxing solution such as foobar2000's chapter conversion... or for that matter, with MP4Box's chapter muxing if tags are then added with Atomic Parsley. (Do it in that order though, or muxing the chapters will erase some existing tags!)

I was hoping the new encoder had internal support for muxing chapters and adding tags/artwork, as the "Store Entire Audio Album in a Single .mp4 File with all the Features of an Audio CD embedded inside, but at a fraction of the space!" description might lead one to believe. Perhaps - if this is not already implemented in some hidden option - support for adding chapters and tags from a CD-TEXT CUE-sheet and embedding specified artwork from files could be added to future versions?

- M.

It already does that. The not-SSE2 binary can still use SSE, SSE2 or SSE3 when it detects that it is possible. The SSE2 binary just uses it everywhere without checking the system it's running on first, which gives an additional 10% performance gain (and a crash if it wasn't supported).

Automatic selection doesn't seem to be possible with the current version of MSVC 2005, which we use, hence the seperate binaries.

Cool. I hope you'll relaese a Mac version soon.