This one's very odd...

When I first tried the nero encoder, I encoded a few samples at the command line at some of the lowest bitrates, and was pretty surprised how good 24kb/s can sound. I've encoded lots of music to 48kb/s now, and it sounds pretty good... I really have to listen pretty intently to find artefacts and such, so it's perfect for my applications in a noisier environment.

In any case, I had 200 albums in one collection, and it was just a *wee* bit too big to fit onto a DVD, so I wanted to encode it again to -q 0.19 in neroaacenc. I'm using foobar as the frontend for this task, and encoding from flac -8 files, but I get the same results from wavs, and it doesn't matter if I do it using the command line or foobar.

My 48kb/s files are fine, but whenever I make something lower than that, it's really messed up... huge glitches all through the file, noise, audio dropouts, popping, etc.

What the heck is going on? Has anyone else ever experienced issues like this with encoding to Nero AAC?

Yes I did. Strangely, using other AAC encoders did not produce the same result (e.g. CT's).

Even stranger, the pops, clicks, etc. happened only when I play it with foobar2000. WinAmp happily plays the files without those disturbances.

And I don't have a single clue why... but then again, I couldn't care less as I found the best encoding for my needs is 52 kbps stereo using MediaCoder & CT encoder into .aac files which foobar2000 does not support, and thus get played in WinAmp exclusively.

Problem is most likely related to PS decoding, and it will be fixed soon.

Don't worry - your files should be OK

Well that's a relief. Just a problem with the foobar's decoder?

I should try these out in Winamp to see if I they sound okay there. In what piece of software does this need to be fixed?

fixed

What exactly?

menno: By "fixed", do you mean foobar2000 is fixed or the encoder is fixed?

Anyways, I think I'll stick to WinAmp for playing .aac files. foobar2000 has a serious problem with transcoding to Ogg. See here.

Ah yeah the decoder. Wait for a foobar update.

Interesting. I was DJing with foobar2000 the other day, before it got too busy, and I swore I could hear lots of little clicks in the audio. I was playing AAC files most of the time, and I really do suspect that I have some issue with my audio interface, but this issue couldn't have helped.