Consumers are confused enough with the multitude of containers (.mp4, .m4a, .aac, .3gp), and the incompatibilities of tags (iTunes vs Nero vs Sony's 3gp). Then there's HE-AAC. Why can't just all manufactures that support AAC put in support for HE-AAC as well? It's just too confusing for regular consumers.

quite agree. hence my ongoing love of mp3. no confusion at all.

edit 2: aac is a shambles. i gave up on it when i discovered we had 'lc' or 'he' versions to choose from. wtf??

Yeak, except for how awesome it sounds at low bitrates like 96 or 128.

I agree about he AAC though. great for streaming and a remarkable accomplishment, especially Nero. I just can't see where I will ever use it though unless my Nano starts to support it.

AAC-HE has little support in general because its useless at the bitrates most people actually want to use (I.E. >= 100kbps) and also fairly expensive to implement.

I could very well say the same for Ogg and mp3 nowadays. There really isn't anything that special about AAC IMO. Especially since I shy away from ipods and itunes.

Have a nice day

Yet another issue I like to quote to people who evangelize AAC as a replacement for MP3. Not happening anytime soon.

HE-AAC is a marvel at 64 kbps...I await the first media player to support it.

A Toshiba GigaBeat with Rockbox can play it. The trouble with HE-AAC is that it requires lots of CPU power, which is turn requires lots of power and means less battery lifetime for the players.

Considering that DAPs today can decode videos, .H264 (which I presume would take more processing power than decoding HE-AAC), multitasking photos and music, etc, I don't think CPU power is the issue. Besides, almost most modern cellphone can decode HE-AAC.

Is it licensing issue? Standard issue? What's the hold up? I guess manufactures cannot even decide the container/tagging standard they will use, let alone adding support for HE-AAC.

Apple obviously won't touch HE-AAC, since it will confuse people and it's not supported on the millions of iPods out there. Microsoft supporting AAc on the Zune is like a fluke, I don't think they will support HE-AAC. The only player that might be implementing HE-AAC is Sony, but they cannot even get their act together in doing simple business.

Sony already has their competitor against HE AAC: ATRAC3plus.

Most Mp3 players aren't fast enough. Ipods, iRivers, etc. The Zune and Gigabeats being the exception.



Incidentally, the Zune and Gigabeats use a processor line thats made for cell phones, which is why they're so much faster then all other mp3 players.

Don't even get me started on ATRAC3 and ATRAC3 plus.

I too would like to see HE-AAC implementation as I own a couple of 1GB flash players (a 1G iPod shuffle and a 2G iPod shuffle) and HE-AAC would really help with those players as I could fit around 500 songs encoded at 64kbps and they would retain the same sound quality as 128kbps VBR AAC when using the stock Apple earbuds (I have conducted the blind ABX tests and failed miserably). I know Apple is coming out with a AACenhanced encoder with the new iChat software that uses the cameras built into iMacs and their notebooks. Basically, it is Apple's version of HE-AAC. I just wonder if they would allow it to be used with iPods.

On the whole, HE-AAC is doing nicely, I think. Winamp support out-of-the-box, VLC support out-of-the box, WMP support as add-in - that covers the most popular players. Mobiles are busy making flash DAPs obsolete so quickly that most manufacturers don't know what hit them.

The only laggard in this picture is Apple, and Leopard should put an end to that. They'll have to come round sooner or later now that they've got the iPhone - nearly all mobile video is in .3gp and it'll start to look rediculous that a €30 phone can play things that the iPhone cannot.

Here we go again - once someone mention Atrac3(plus) some other people gets agressive. Why this hatred of Atrac3plus? It wasn't even considered for the 64 kbs listening test. Here is why I like it:

1) It sounds very good!
2) The battery on the supported players last very long! (30 hours on NW-HD1/3, 40 hours on NW-HD5)

I was just for vacation for 6 weeks in Mexico. Unfortunately my baggage was lost, including the cradle/charger. But I managed to get a replacement cradle and charger from China before the battery ran out. And on the player (NW-HD1) I had access to close to 700 albums. Can you beat that on other players/codecs? No, I didn't think so!


Trondis

I just don't like the format because it is a proprietary format. It can only be played back on some Sony players. If Sony really wanted to flex the muscles of their ATRAC3plus format, then they would have made it open (like making it HE-AAC). That way people could judge the quality themselves and switch to Sony's software. I am not about to switch to a Sony world just to take advantage of ATRAC3plus whenever the only thing that will be able to play that is my Sony device and computer, the PS3 won't even fully play ATRAC3plus files.

Moderation: Removed excessive quoting. Keep it reasonable.

SONY has a reputation to live down in music after the rootkit scandal. One can legitimately ask "Who's to say using using ATRAC3plus software won't crash my computer or open the door to (more) viruses?" Or "What's SONY hiding with this mysterious, proprietary format?"

I agree that it was a big mistake of Sony not to release the Atrac code. And it was a mistake to make the Sony players dependant on SonicStage, which many hate. That way they have lost a great part of the market. The hardware they make has always got great reviews.

On the other hand, if only a few players support HE-AAC, or if that codec is burning out the batteries so fast, then I think that HE-AAC is in a similar situation as Sony and Atrac. With limited support on portable players I don't see much point in using it right now. 64 kbs is for portable players. On desktop computers I doubt that many would use it. If I was playing back my music from a desktop PC I would probably use a lossless format.



Trondis

If you read my original post again, you'll see I was mainly referring to battery power. Most manufacturers simply don't want to sacrifice battery power.

As Mike Giacomelli said, DAP's tend to be under powered. For instance the iPod has a PortalPlayer chip with a ARM7 core clocked at a max of 80Mhz, when you compare this to a SE K800i, it was a ARM9 chip (common in phones) clocked at >210Mhz.

In terms of MIPs; the iPod can do about 80 MIPs at full speed, whereas the K800i can do about 220 MIPs at full speed. Thats why the phones can decode HE-AAC. And the reason the iPod can decode H264 is because it uses a seperate Broadcom chip for video decoding.

Incidentally the Zune is actually made by Toshiba, and is believed to just be a GigaBeat S with a facelift. The Gigabeat S is probably the most powerful DAP available at the mo. It has a ARM11 clocked at over 510Mhz. When you compare that to the iPod's paltry ARM7 80Mhz, I think you can see why the iPod can't decode HE-AAC in realtime.

For a set of real-world values, a few days ago I recorded my usage and logged the following on my Treo 680:

• Listened to almost seven hours of 64kbps HE-AACv1 (actual playlist was 6 hours, 54 minutes)
• Spoke on the phone for twenty-four minutes
• Sent and received a half dozen text messages

The HE-AAC listening was via TCPMP 0.72RC1, using the BetaPlayer AAC plugin from RareWarez. Probably could have listened to an additional hour of music, if I hadn't needed to answer the phone.

- M.

Decoding HE AAC on 80MHz ARM is possible. Maybe just not with Rockbox...

I'm sure it is, but you'd probably need to do a lot of optimizations to the decoder, and the CPU would probably be at the full clock speed for the majority of the time, killing the battery.

Real world experience: at some point I thought it was a good idea to transcode-on-sync all my music to 64k Vorbis for playback on my phone. You know, three times as much music on that 1GB memory card, no-brainer right? Big mistake - I got less than three hours of playback instead of the usual 10+ with mp3. Maybe HE-AAC is a bit better than Vorbis in that respect, but still there's something to say for choosing battery life over storage space.

Well, if Sony is so big on Atrac, then why would they co-developed AAC. Considering Sony Ericsson cellphones supporting AAC, HE-AAC, and not Atrac (except Japanese SE phones), and support of AAC in PSP, PS3, newer network Walkmen and car decks, I think Sony is moving to AAC, and hopefully HE-AAC. You can already rip to HE-AAC in sonicstage, but Sony uses .3gp container and iTunes tags are not compatible.

Mp3 does not compete favourably with AAC at lower bitrates and Vorbis unfortunately is not supported by the vast majority of portable players.

AAC is a bit more special because it is supported by the best selling line of players available, as well as satellite radio IIRC.

I don't think that CPU usage of 80 MHz (of a typical ARM 150-200 MHz) is going to hurt battery that much.

What hurts much more are the patent fees needed to be paid by the hw. vendor in order to support HE-AAC.

http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/MPEG...ct=MPEG-4HEAACP

$0.63 per channel (<100K)
$0.46 per channel (100-500K)
$0.34 per channel (500K-1M)
$0.28 per channel (1M-5M)

If we are talking about a product which is going to ship in e.g. 2 million qty - they'd have to pay almost 70 cents just to be able to decode HE-AAC. Add 10 cents extra for HE-AAC v2, and you end up with 80ct.

This is a big bunch of money - especially in the cut-throat competition to get the prices down, and most OEMs would think twice before adding another 80ct of patent burden to their product.

The first question they'd ask is - how much people ask for it. At the moment, not much - HE-AAC v2 is great, but the demand for it is not that great to force everyone to have it, like MP3.

However, one good thing for HE-AAC (v2) is that 3G phones support it - as portable devices will evolve in the iPhone direction, I am pretty confident that in two-three years most of the DAPs will actually have HE-AAC v2, as they will be highly-usable mobile phones

I was referring to the iPod when I was talking about 80Mhz. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Chipsets_and_electronics

I didn't realise the HE-AAC licensing fees were that high, by comparison how much lower is LC-AAC fees?

Feel free to optimize libfaad to make it possible...

At 64kbps the tests show you are right. But since I don't rip music at 64kbps, for me personally its pretty much a mute point. If it floats your boat however go for it.

Well, surprise surprise. Probably the first DAP (non-cellphone) that supports HE-AAC, from Sony. NW-S71x. Alas, it seems to be Japan only.
http://www.ecat.sony.co.jp/walkman/product...amp;KM=NW-S718F

Are there any HE-AAC encoders for OS X?

I would be willing to bet money that the reason for the lack of support for HE-AAC from major players (iPod, Zune, etc) is that they would lose money by selling fewer high capacity DAP's.

With HE-AAC, who would need 60-80 gb of storage space??

They don't want HE-AAC because of the small file sizes & high quality. It's a revenue killer.

I'm piling into this old thread with a question about the decoder in the Sony Ericsson Walkman series (I have the W580i)...
I'm wondering if S-E has some special tricks because the sound of my files done with Nero q 0.26 -- 50 to 60 kbps -- is so amazing. Might it merely be power and an absence of clipping?
I'm an HE-AAC enthusiast; how can one not like that an 8Gb memory stick now costing about $US 100 transforms an S-E phome into something akin to a 20 Gb player?

That would be expected. If S-E hasn't screwed up the decoder or electronics side of things (decent amp & DAC components), 50-60 kbps HE-AAC should be near/at transparency in most cases considering the way most portable players/phones are used (ie, in noisy environments, on the move).

Aah, thanks so much!
Self-proclaimed audio gourmets seem often to overlook what is possible during an urban walkabout.