Is there something considered reference such as LAME for MP3 ?
I have a huge movie trailer collection downloaded from Apple in mov containers (practically all of them have AAC audio) which I'm muxing to matroska and what I'm looking for is a decoder from AAC to PCM in order to make all audio content in FLAC.
Yeah yeah I know ... a waste of space; but I gladly prefer many more GBs of storage than to have to daily fight with a million decoders and this codec war or whatever is far from ending anytime soon. Long ago I choose matroska+flac and I'm quite happy with the combo.
One more thing ... I noted multi-channel AAC is ordered as C L R Ls Rs LFE as showed in QuickTime movie inspector, is this constant or should I expect mov files ordered differently ? I need to be sure of this beacuse a script is the way I'll do the conversion.
Any comments will be welcome.
Full Version: What is the best command tool to decode AAC to PCM ?
QUOTE
Any comments will be welcome.
What codec war are you talking about? If the "trailers" are for your own personal use then it's no harder to get and install CoreAAC than the Nero CLI decoder. If you're going to redistribute the material, then people will be more pissed about the quality/size ratio than the possible missing codec.
QUOTE(Spectrvm @ Jul 30 2008, 21:30) 
I'm looking for is a decoder from AAC to PCM in order to make all audio content in FLAC.
This just seems dumb to me. AAC is a far more compatible format in general, not to mention much more space-economical. Oh well, to each his own.
My personal feelings aside, FAAD2 is a well-established decoder. You can get it over at RareWares. If you use the “-w” switch you should be able to pipe the output directly into your FLAC encoder.
QUOTE(j7n @ Jul 30 2008, 23:12)
QUOTE
Any comments will be welcome.
What codec war are you talking about? If the "trailers" are for your own personal use then it's no harder to get and install CoreAAC than the Nero CLI decoder. If you're going to redistribute the material, then people will be more pissed about the quality/size ratio than the possible missing codec.
No. Obviously I'm not redistributing nothing, it's for personal use and nothing more, that's why I don't give a damn about the increased size if this will give me simplicity.
Maybe "codec war" was not the best smart phrase I came upon; what I was meaning was that it's kinda of non-sense to have many codecs to do the same thing for every media type, I mean, this is great because competition brings innovation, but now think from the point of view of the end user: a typical system has 5 or more codec packages which fight each other for control of playing back what are designed to play (and something more I may say), every time you install this new codec package you need it changes (usually without warning) the merit of related filters to take control, uninstalling these packages many times are worse than levaing them alone, etc etc and by the way, you know it's all out of control when every time you want to watch a movie you start thinking what codec it's using ? are my settings used ? have they changed ? etc etc
Just tired of all these situations, nothing more and nothing against AAC AC3 DTS or whatever codec it comes to mind ... just want to choose ONE and if anything is not playing the way it should be I know where to go, usually one property page and nothing more.
QUOTE(Hengest @ Jul 30 2008, 23:04)
Nope. Hate Nero. One of the bloated packages/suites that instantly wants to take control of your entire system. The last time I uninstalled Nero was almost two years ago ... but THANKS anyway
!!!
QUOTE
Nope. Hate Nero. One of the bloated packages/suites that instantly wants to take control of your entire system. The last time I uninstalled Nero was almost two years ago ... but THANKS anyway !!!
How is it bloated it's a simply command-line utility!? I think I missing something here? All you need to do download the zip package and start decoding your AAC files.
QUOTE(MuncherOfSpleens @ Jul 30 2008, 23:47)
QUOTE(Spectrvm @ Jul 30 2008, 21:30)
I'm looking for is a decoder from AAC to PCM in order to make all audio content in FLAC.
This just seems dumb to me. AAC is a far more compatible format in general, not to mention much more space-economical. Oh well, to each his own.
My personal feelings aside, FAAD2 is a well-established decoder. You can get it over at RareWares. If you use the “-w” switch you should be able to pipe the output directly into your FLAC encoder.
looks good ... downloading it
THANKS !PS: if you check my other replies you'll find the reason I'm going this way
QUOTE(HotshotGG @ Jul 31 2008, 00:05)
QUOTE
Nope. Hate Nero. One of the bloated packages/suites that instantly wants to take control of your entire system. The last time I uninstalled Nero was almost two years ago ... but THANKS anyway !!!
How is it bloated it's a simply command-line utility!? I think I missing something here? All you need to do download the zip package and start decoding your AAC files.
ahhhh sorry !
thought you were talking about installing the whole Nero Suite !
I'll check it
Alf rocks
QUOTE(MuncherOfSpleens @ Jul 30 2008, 23:47)
QUOTE(Spectrvm @ Jul 30 2008, 21:30)
I'm looking for is a decoder from AAC to PCM in order to make all audio content in FLAC.
This just seems dumb to me. AAC is a far more compatible format in general, not to mention much more space-economical. Oh well, to each his own.
My personal feelings aside, FAAD2 is a well-established decoder. You can get it over at RareWares. If you use the “-w” switch you should be able to pipe the output directly into your FLAC encoder.
FAAD it's a go; definitely the tool I was looking for, clean, tiny, and does the job.
It even warned me of multi-channel remapping when going to WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE
Only thing that surprised me was the fact that is has no option to create a log file like almost every tool like this have, redirecting the output with > creates a blank file, even I can't get output in PowerShell with:
CODE
new-Item -path 'whatever.log' -ItemType file -value (out-string -inputObject (faad.exe -i -w 'whatever.aac'))
anyway it's working !
THANK YOU
!
Did you try redirecting output using "2>"?
What is it about nero that caused you to go with FAAD?
What is it about nero that caused you to go with FAAD?
QUOTE(greynol @ Jul 31 2008, 17:08)
Did you try redirecting output using "2>"?
What is it about nero that caused you to go with FAAD?
2> ... and I got this mess:
CODE
faad.exe : *********** Ahead Software MPEG-4 AAC Decoder V2.6 ******************
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : Build: Apr 29 2008
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : Copyright 2002-2004: Ahead Software AG
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : http://www.audiocoding.com
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : Floating point version
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : it under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : **************************************************************************
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : whatever.aac file info:
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : ADTS, 106.155 sec, 207 kbps, 48000 Hz
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : Build: Apr 29 2008
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : Copyright 2002-2004: Ahead Software AG
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : http://www.audiocoding.com
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : Floating point version
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : it under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : **************************************************************************
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : whatever.aac file info:
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe : ADTS, 106.155 sec, 207 kbps, 48000 Hz
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
faad.exe :
At line:1 char:5
+ faad <<<< -i 'whatever.aac' 2> 'whatever.log'
downloaded nero; neroAacDec -if 'whatever.aac' -of 'whatever.wav'
got: moov box not found
faad worked without a hitch
by the way, the other thing
CODE
faad -i
is missing is the number and configuration of channels
The proper syntax is to put spaces between -xf and the filename. Also the filename is to be placed in double quotes, not single quotes:
neroAacDec -if "whatever.aac" -of "whatever.wav"
Regarding 2>, it's working just fine. The problem is that faad continually updates the completion percentage. 2> works better with neroAacDec, except the only output is a useless banner.
neroAacDec -if "whatever.aac" -of "whatever.wav"
Regarding 2>, it's working just fine. The problem is that faad continually updates the completion percentage. 2> works better with neroAacDec, except the only output is a useless banner.
QUOTE(greynol @ Jul 31 2008, 17:50)
The proper syntax is to put spaces between -xf and the filename. Also the filename is to be placed in double quotes, not single quotes:
neroAacDec -if "whatever.aac" -of "whatever.wav"
Regarding 2>, it's working just fine. The problem is that faad continually updates the completion percentage. 2> works better with neroAacDec, except the only output is a useless banner.
in PowerShell you use 'whatever.aac' when you need to specify literal paths and double quotes like "%temp%\whatever.aac" when you need to expand them, that's why my examples all have single quotes
yes, I can see the way that both utilities are redirecting the output and the more I see the more I think both need a log option switch like flac mkvinfo and everything else on the planet to avoid these turnarounds
Well, nero does let you know if there's a decoding error and will present such information in a log using 2>.
The Nero decoder only decodes from MP4 files.
try mplayer, use "-ao pcm:fast:file=xxx.wav" to decode to pcm file
it supports aac embedded in almost any container
it supports aac embedded in almost any container
I use neroAACenc and I am satisfied with it.That is way I would like to clarify the "proper syntax".
It is: neroaacenc [options] -if <input-file> -of <output-file>
neroACCenc is a Windows command line program which impose:
- either file names without spaces
- or double quote marks surrounding a file name including spaces.
Do you need examples?
-either -if input_file_name.wav -of output_file_name.m4a
-or -if "input file name.wav" -of "output file name.m4a"
Again it is a Windows command line syntax.
QUOTE(Spectrvm @ Jul 30 2008, 20:58)
No. Obviously I'm not redistributing nothing, it's for personal use and nothing more, that's why I don't give a damn about the increased size if this will give me simplicity.
"not... nothing" ooookay.
I'm not sure when you started to believe that FLAC audio in movie files was a move towards simplicity, but it's truly the opposite. The codec problems that you've referenced simply aren't problems... ever. You've installed a filter for FLAC... great. Install a filter for AAC and you'd have the same functionality with a fraction of the complexity that you've introduced with your remuxing process and you'll have saved a ton of disc space. This is silliness.
QUOTE(Curtor @ Aug 3 2008, 15:21)
"not... nothing" ooookay.
Some languages, like Bulgarian for example, allow such double negation. I think it is more expressive and stressing the fact of negation and the English language, which is the best example for an evolving language, at least to me, could accept it also.
In my world double negative cancels out and becomes positive. I know there are languages where one cannot even make a logical structure with a single negative. The expression is not stronger, it's simply how they speak every day.
so what's 1 - -1 in bulgaria? 2?
I would write the expression this way:(-1) + (-1) = 2 x (-1) or
(-expr) && (-expr) = -expr
It's not proper English and it's never going to be.
The United States may have more of this going around, but it doesn't make it right. If the British begin down the same path, then I'd be worried.
Is there any hope left for an on-topic discussion, or should I allow another round of arguments and then close it?
The United States may have more of this going around, but it doesn't make it right. If the British begin down the same path, then I'd be worried.
Is there any hope left for an on-topic discussion, or should I allow another round of arguments and then close it?
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.