I checked and the Nomad Jukebox 3 has AAC support. Is there other hardware out there that has support for AAC?

With hard drives for PC's so cheap these days I'm not all that concerned about file size, I figure using a bit rate of 256 kbps all the lossy codecs should sound good. Or is this a bad assumption?

I figure with 256 kbps files and 140 GB of hard drive space I have room for far more music than I own or will own in the near term anyway. So portable player support what I'm interested in.

Before I go ahead and invest the time to encode my CD collection, I'd like to know what portable support is out there as I plan on picking up a hard drive based portable in the next year.

I know just about every portable out there supports mp3, but what about the other formats. Ogg really appeals to me as it's open source, but in the end I want portable support.

Is there any reason why I shouldn't just go mp3?

Mod - this was my first post and I think I posted in the wrong forum. Could this please be moved to the general section?

Then why not use MP3? Its more compatable and you yourself just said everything sounds good to you at high bit rates.



Since LAME is also open sourced and works with ever portable MP3 player, I'd probably use that. Not to mention it works nicely with ipods.

I would like to make a suggestion to you: why don't you make lossless copies of your music for storage on your 140GB hard drive? Then, if you change your mind about which lossy format you want to use (MP3, AAC, Vorbis, MPC), you can switch to that format with a simple overnight (or over-week) batch encode, rather than by digging through all your CD's again.

Okay, now I will address your other questions:

The Phillips Expanium portable MP3-CD players also play AAC audio.

All modern lossy audio formats (when the best encoder available is used, such as Lame for MP3) will sound perfect at ~320kbps for almost all your music. Of course, 100% perfect quality can never be guraranteed with lossy audio, and even a single transcoding can create audible artifacts (so once you've committed to a file format, you're stuck with those files until you re-rip your CD's, unless you can tolerate inferior quality).

The big reason why I wouldn't go with MP3: It creates small gaps of silence at the beginning (or end, or both) of the file, which are audible when playing back consecutive MP3's created from an album which has seamless transitions between tracks. I know MPC and Ogg Vorbis are gapless. I'm not so sure about AAC, though. Of course, this makes no difference if your portable player does not have gapless playback to begin with, but for me personally, this is an important feature.

Another reason not to use MP3: it has worse pre-echo artifacting than MPC and (reportedly) Garf's Tuned Vorbis, meaning extreme transient samples aren't as sharp-sounding. You might not run into such types of transients in your music collection, though.

Where did you find that information (URL)?



Yes, but not for HDD based ones, as far as I know:
http://www.audiocoding.com/wiki/index.php?...e+Audio+Players



Probably good enough, so you could also stick to MP3, because there are some HDD portables for it right now, e.g. the RCA Lyra RD2820 that also supports mp3PRO since January 2003.

Sometimes Warrior, thanks for the tip on gapless playback. Yes gapless playback is important to me. I have enough CD's that are live performances or where there's just no gap in between the songs. That's one of the things I really like about my new Minidisc player over a flash mp3 player, it preserves the track marks without creating gaps.

Thanks for the replies, I think I'll actually just keep files in wave format and look for a portable (yes, I have a couple and want another) that has gapless playback and supports one of the gapless formats.

Hans - Right at www.nomadworld.com which I believe is Creative's official site for their portable players. If you go to the NJB3 and click on specs it says it will play AAC files.

Does anyone know if AAC is gapless?

Sorry, either they have changed this recently to WMA support or it never supported AAC:

http://www.nomadworld.com/products/jukebox3/specs.asp



I don't know, but this will probably be handled outside of AAC in the Systems part of the MPEG-4 standard, because all kinds of content must use the same method for this problem.

You also wrote in your first post that you plan to buy the Nomad (or another HDD portable) in the next year, so maybe then you'll have more options to choose from than now.

By the way, I also don't know if the new WMA9 format has support for gapless files, maybe you can find something about it in this interesting PDF file (a new Technical Review from the EBU about WMA/WMV):

http://www.ebu.ch/trev_293-ribas.pdf

Hans I could have sworn that I read AAC support, but now you're making me wonder if I was imagining it.

However this link http://www.zdnet.com/supercenter/stories/o...,563601,00.html

does say AAC support for the new 40 GB model, so maybe the page has changed as you suggested, but I'm really not sure.

PS - I read the ZDnet page 3 times before I posted to make sure it did say AAC and I wasn't misreading it

I guess I'll hold off buying another portable for the time being. I still really like my MD unit so I'll stick with that and perhaps buy a 2nd for my wife to use.

Thanks for the link, it was interesting to read, although they are probably wrong stating an AAC support. Nevertheless you can put ~1000 songs in plain WAV format on a 40 GB HDD, so you wouldn't have to worry for a compressed format, I guess. What makes it even more interesting is the ability to record digitally and analog in WAV and MP3 format. Only the price ($400-550) is a bit "over the top", at least for me.



Yes, I know this problem from trying to find valid information about AAC support for Philips Expaniums...



In one year they will probably come up with a 100 GB model. By the way, there's a thread here saying that WMA9 is gapless, if this is a major problem for you:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....&f=1&t=6528&hl=

Well, using Foobar2000 .51 and some MP4's I created with Nero playback gapless. So it would appear to me, gapless works as should be.

ISO AAC isn't gapless.

But AAC inside an MP4 file might be, I'm not sure about this.

Now, for the thread topic - some great news here:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=ST&f=13&t=6691