For most of us AAC users, our biggest challenge is the lack of widespread support for our codec. Once we step away from the PC/Mac and iPod - AAC support is limited at best. However, it seems like more manufacturers are embracing AAC, probably due to iTunes domination of the digital music market. I recently read that the new Sony DAPs coming out will play AAC and I seem to recall certain Nokia phones are AAC compliant.

The purspose of this thread is to gather information on all the devices available that support AAC (LC). Specifiy if HE - AAC is supported as well. Of primary interest are DAPs, phones, rack system components, and car audio CD players.

Note to newbies: AAC is not an 'Apple' codec, like WMA is a Microsoft codec. In addition to the AAC one can create with iTunes/Quicktime, Nero offers a wonderful AAC encoder as well.

I'll kick off the thread with the easiest one.

The following iPods support AAC - 3G, 4G, 5G with Video, Shuffle, Mini, Nano.

What else?........

That seems a bit too pessimistic.

I don't think there are audio-capable Nokia's that don't support AAC. Actually, the support in phones is quite good nowadays. Wikipedia's article on AAC has this rather outdated list:

As you can see, all big manufacturers have at least one phone on this list and this list is a bit outdated. I think you can say AAC is pretty much standard on all modern middle and high-end phones nowadays.

Furthermore, a firmware update made a couple of older Sony 'Walkmans' AAC capable recently.
The Play Station Portable (PSP) added AAC through a firmware update a couple of months ago.

The Sony Ericsson K800i cellular phone supports AAC files.
So does Rockbox, which run on many different DAP's.

My Samsung a900 phone plays AAC quite nicely

Every "mainstream" (ie, selling in significant numbers) music phone supports LC-AAC nowadays. HE-AAC is something else (N-series Nokia, but what else?), but I guess that HE-AAC will only take off in a major way once Apple get their ass in gear and add support for it in iTunes 7.

What about that new "Chocolate' DAP/phone tht debuts this week? I cannot seem to find anything yes/no on AAC support for that phone.

The Oakley Thump 2 sunglasses with built-in DAP can play AAC.
According to CNet the Wolverine MPV series plays AAC although their website doesn't mention any format.
A lot of Pioneer Car CD players support AAC.

I just recently got a Kenwood CD player for my truck that plays AAC, either from a CD or from a USB drive. The new Nero AAC codec works fine, even VBR.

Nearly all phones nowadays support LC-AAC due to nearly all phones having having MP4 video playback (which usually uses AAC-LC as the audio codec). Nearly every new phone I've seen has HE-AAC support now, and a growing number are supporting PS. Mine does, it's a Nokia 6131 (Series 40, so all Nokia in the future will support AAC-LC/HE+PS).

The AAC codec are in Rockbox, that's true. However, it doesn't play files in realtime on my iRiver H340, and I think this goes for the other players too, except iPod. (Is this still true, only the iPod versions of Rockbox plays AAC realtime?)

It's said on the forum that optimizations are necessary before AAC will be playable in realtime on most targets. This will take efforts by a developer. However, currently noone are working on this, no core developer uses AAC, and no developer interested or knowledgable in AAC are working on the Rockbox project.

Palm OS 5 PDAs with Kinoma Player 3 EX.
http://www.kinoma.com/

Accroding to the wiki (http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main...#Current_status)

Only 4th gen and newer iPods currently support AAC

So rockbox currently doesn't add AAC support to anything that didn't already support AAC in the first place

My nokia N-gage plays AAC's and you can use them as ringtones

My Samsung D520 will play HE-AAC+PS.

When my iPod broke this was a godsend because it only has 80MB of internal storage.

Are there any non-cell phone DAP that supports HE-AAC?

The LG KG800 seems to support AAC according to GSM Arena, but the American CDMA version (LG VX-8500) doesn't have it listed. It's quite possible that it has AAC support as well, since the phones look like identical models, but I know Verizon generally uses their own firmware on phones, sometimes crippling or disabling features, so it's quite possible that their CDMA version doesn't have it. I guess it depends on which "Chocolate" phone you get.

I think all 3gpp phones should support HE AAC(v2).

Most of current and up-coming phone can play AAC easily (even SBR+PS)
However, it's hard to find Vorbis's phone support (or it's my fault)

Mobile Phones are supporting HE-AAC because of the 3gpp standard (3G capabilities basically), and because of ringtones, which turn in lots of revenue.
In other words, sort of "by demand".

This has been a good discussion. We have identified many phones that support AAC and even 2 brands of car audio CD players. What about any DVD rack players? Almost all DVD players play MP3 Cds now and a great many play WMA. Any play AAC?

A Panasonic DAP range (SD-SVxxxx) that plays AAC:
http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_9351.html
http://www.engadget.com/2005/03/29/itmedia...-and-sv-sd100v/

Any NeroDigital certified player

I found that my Nokia 6131 supports AVC (h.264) too!
But why it doesn't kill iPod Video?

Fascinating! The Microsoft Zune is going to support AAC. That means Windows Media Player is going to support AAC as well.

Whether you like MS or not, this might be a big breakthrough for AAC.

Sony Walkman NW-S200 and NW-A1200 are supporting AAC playback (LC-AAC I suppose).

I agree. I also heard about the Zune announcement today, and welcome it for opening up Windows Media Player 11 to start natively supporting AAC for playing files. Would be nice if they also supported AACPlus (HE-AAC), but at least AAC support from Microsoft is a start. Should make .m4a files even more popular.

Let's just hope they won't introduce yet another tagging 'standard' for m4a.

I agree! No more m4a tagging standards

We have no confirmation WMP 11 will "officially" play AAC/M4A content out of the box. All they've said is the Zune front end, which is similar to the UI used by MTV URGE, will allow you to load-up existing unprotected M4A.

Anyway, WMP 10/11 can play M4A content today... thanks to free plug-in AAC filters and WMPTSE for tag support.

Well if WMP 11 doesn't natively support m4a playback "out of the box", it would be very surprising to me, as you would think that WMP 11 would support all of the playback formats that MS' own ZUNE supported. Unless it is that the Zune software only transcoded M4A's to their own WMA format for import, but I think the press release says that the Zune device will playback iPod generated AAC files.

The Zune player will load and play AAC/M4A natively. That is confirmed.

I hope it adds the AAC codec & tag library support to WMP, but there is a chance AAC/M4A will only work in the Zune desktop UI... or (worst case) that the files only play on the Zune portable player itself. We'll need to wait and see...

Given that Zune will use WMP as the tag parser, I think its pretty clear this means WMP is getting AAC support (or at least tag reading).

Well, the Toshiba Gigabeat (which apparently the Zune is based on) parses its own tags from the files, so WMP is not necessarily involved. However, it is hard to see how you can do any decent library management/synchronizing in WMP without being able to read the tags.

I guess that also solves the mystery why WMP11 takes so long when the betas were already pretty good: AAC/MP4 support still had to be coded.

According to official tech specs, Motorola E770 (Vodafone's E770v included) and E1000 are both AAC (LC-AAC) + eAAC (HE-AAC v1) + eAAC+ (HE-AAC v2) supported. Upcoming KRZR and RIZR are supporting all of those, too.

By the way, the E1000 was released in 2004 and E770 was released in 2005, should I believe Motorola that E770 and E1000 are supporting HE-AAC v2, I don't really know exactly but I don't think HE-AAC v2 have any hardware decoder in 2004 :/

Correct me if I'm wrong please, I'm going to go out and buy an E770 soon, dirt cheap here...

My girlfriend just got herself an LG KG800 ("Chocolate") and this one is interesting: The manual says it only supports CBR MP3 and AAC but as a matter of fact it plays back VBR perfectly.

It also supports HE AAC v2 with parametric stereo. Files produced with neroaacenc at quality settings between 0.20 and 0.50 play without any problem. (Lower quality files also work but sound awful - and well; who really wants to know...)

A shame that this phone hasn't got a decent way to manage music. Not even subfolders are allowed.

HE-AAC support on mobiles is widespread because HE-AAC is included in the 3GPP video standard. If you look at this sales chart, every single phone in it has HE-AAC support.

Pioneer A/V receivers (at least the 2006 models) can play AAC files from a USB key or other USB mass storage device. I didn't test mine to see if it can play AAC coming through the SPDIF optical input, simply because I don't know how to force my Linux box to output AAC to ALSA's SPDIF output.

A company that makes Sound processing for broadcasters - Orban, makes an AAC plug-in for the Micro$oft Windowz Media player. It's at http://www.orban.com/plugin/.

I tried to find in Portugal some non expensive portable player supporting AAC and the only supporting was the Ipod family. The Ipod Shuffle is not expensive but the lack of a screen gives me the creeps. Also MS's Zune will be rather expensive. I would love to have one besides an Apple or mobile phone but I think it's impossible to find it here in Portugal.

I'm not sure what your definition of expensive is, but you can get a 2GB iPod Nano for $145. It holds 500 songs at 128 kbps and has a screen.

That may sound inexspensive to you and I can buy it here for about the same amount, but the problem is that Portuguese average income is much smaller (around $500 per month).

Does anybody know what the cheapest mobile support aac+?

Likely some older Nokia from the 6000 series.

Squeezebox has support for AAC as well as Transporter from SlimDevices.
http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_squeezebox.html#formats
http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_transporter.html#trans-formats

From my owen experiens:
Mobile Samsung X700. Support AAC/AAC+ written on the box. However, it only plays AAC. It does play HE-AAC without SBR and HE-AAC v2 mono. And there is a limit of 1 Gb microSD flash card.

Nokia 5300 has a "Music player supporting MP3, Midi, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, and WMA formats" so I guess that means HE-ACC+PS. Only 99.99 if you have t-mobile and extend contract for 2 years. 2 Gig MicroSD max

UPDATE

I just got one of these phones and a ripped a song with winamps aac encoder, nero's mp4 encoder using EAC, and iTune's m4a encoder and they all played on the phone w/ proper tag display. I ripped from winamp at 48kbps w/ PS, nero using q .17 and 48kbps in stereo in iTunes. I did not do a double blind abx or anything, I just listened to one song (Green Day - American Idiot) w/ a pair of $50 Sony DJ style headphones, but IMO the WA (CT) and Nero encoder sounder a little bit better, probably due to the PS, than Apples at 48kbps on this little phone.