I want to give AAC a try because portability of music is utmost importance. I know Nero plug-in is good but I don't want to use Nero for ripping. Is there any executable version that I can buy and register? Does the Nero plug-in work with Feurio? What about Quicktime 6? Could quicktime encoder be invoked from CDEx, EAC, etc? I know I can use PsyTel AAC v2.15 but now it's older and I was thinking "why would I?". Also I want to create .mp4 files and therefore I'd like to stay away from using MP4creator which would introduce extra effort.

Let me know how you create your files in EAC and what profiles you use...

The Nero encoder only works with Nero, so for now you have to rip with EAC to Wav, then encode with Nero. Tagging will also have to be done with another prog, from what I understand.

Ogg Vorbis hardware support is just around the corner, from what I understand. Have you tried Garf's GT3 beta yet? Sound quality is very good from what I've read. Nothing compares to Musepack right now, but as you said, portability is important.

Hmm I thought Nero AAC plug-in will work with Feurio as well because it is a product of the same company. Anyway I don't think I'd like to rip into WAV and tag by hand, that would drive me mad. I implicitly assumed Nero plug in should be better because it is developed by the same people and came later. Didn't Ivan consider it to be an update? I guess so.

Yes everyone is talking about Vorbis support coming soon but it seems like it's not going to happen at least in the same scale as AAC/MP4. MP4 looks like it will be ubiquitious in a couple of years. I respect Garf, Monty and other developers working to improve Vorbis. But unfortunately, although it is a free and open codec, people don't contribute as much. And I think it is because they could not contribute even if they want to, like in Garf's case because of limited information on the source code.
And Monty's priorities (like Theora) does not quite coincide with mine. There's still no info on bitrate peeling for instance which was one of the factors I got into Ogg. I wish Vorbis had as much developers as LAME had.

I like MPC. I actually was considering to rip all my CDs into MPC and q4 ogg so that I could play in a portable later on. But that's reduntant space if you consider AAC will be almost as good as MPC (20kbps of difference is not very important for me).

1. As far as I know, Ahead doesn't make Feurio.. This would be news to me..

2. MPC Transcodes well to transform codecs. So it's not really a sin as far as I am concearned to transcode just for portable use, that is what I do since MP3 hardware support is all over the place. My whole collection is MPC from now on because I like the sound quality I get, not to mention the file size.

Yet another AAC thread... "Wazzup widdat?" [ZZ Top] B)

I don't know if they will work, but Feurio is a product of Ahead Software, I think I've read that somewhere, too. Maybe someone knows if Feurio can use the established Nero plugins like FhG MP3 and so on?



But if you use foobar2000's mass-tagger after encoding and converting with Speek's "Ivan & Menno" GUI for PsyTEL AACEnc and mp4creator, the pile of work isn't that high anymore, or is it?



See the other threads dealing with that topic.



By the way, in MPEG-4 this feature is called "scalability" in its different forms. One comparable to "bitrate peeling" would be BSAC (Bit-sliced arithmetic coding), but there are no such AAC codecs publicly available at the moment.

Is the Psytel aacenc v2.15 outdated now?

Has anyione tried the AAC codec in Sorenson Squeeze 3? It sais that they licensed it from Fhg.
Is it the professional codec from them?

I did. And that´s right, it´s FhG´s.

I can post some samples (as soon as I return home - thursday) if anyone is interested.



It seems to be, yes.

But, unfortunately, for some strange reson, bitrate is limited to 128 kbps, there´s no VBR, and you can´t configure it besides bitrate setting.

I wouldn´t say so. aacenc -normal still fullfills my quality demands.