It seems thay Ivan Dimkovic (the maker of pysteel aacenc) and Nic (the developer of AAC Directshowfilter) haved helped a group of East Asians DSP enginers from a small company (or group) named Ekaf, to code a hacked firmware for Ipod that supports playback of mpeg2 LC AAC files.

The hacked firmware should be found here.
http:\\www.ekaf.com.tw/hidden/ekaf.aac.ipod.1b.zip

The firmware update will only allow playbakc of mpeg2 LC AAC files and not mp4, so you will have to extract the aac stream from you mp4 files. or use the old psytell AACenc.exe 2.15.

Playback of .wav files have been corrupted and will Lock you Ipod if you try to play .wav files.

on the to due list is:
Primary
- fix wave file lock
- add mp4 support
secondary
- increase aac/mp4 playback quality
- add vorbis support



Also Ivan has revealed that he has made a new psytell command line encoder.
The new PsyMP4P.exe v2.5 encodes diretly to mp4 files.

many improven have ben made to the encoder quality/funktionality, and it should rival MPC in midrange bitrates (around 128-168)

A new block switching algoritne is introduced with the help of a developer named "Loof Sleirpa" who is also working af Ahead.
This should increase quality on many sharp attacks. It is very noticable on samples like Castanets2.wav.
where even 128kbits seem to sound accurate now.

The PNS have ben tuned to increase quality in low bitrate preset like -internet and below.
Files with small background noise should benefit from this ALOT.

SBR have been experimental add'et.
So far its mostly tuned for the lowbitrates preset with PNS (-internet and below) be it can be forced into any encoding setting with the -ekoj switch.
This should increase quality even more in the low bitrates or high bitrates where accuracy of High freqvency is not needed.


The new encoder have been tuned at the 128-160kbits to give increased qualtiy compared to the 2.15 encoder.
This is also present in the streaming/normal preset.
The new quality should rival MPC

more high bitrate tunnings will come so that later psymp4p.exe should rival (and maybe surpass) MPC at higher bitrates also



The new encoder can be found at the rareware sites

This is a great step for the people using AAC (and like me have an Ipod) on this first april day 2003

And while we're at it, I can tell you that iRiver in their latest 3.0 firmware now finally support Vorbis! People at the vorbis mailing list have tested it:

And perfectly timed with this release, Segher finished his peeling tool for Ogg, called Rhubarber. Sourcecode included.

Also the long awaited player which c.b.2000 on this forum has been developing an MPC decoder for, was released yesterday. It is not yet available in Europe and America, but if it is successful in the Asian market in the next three months, they will launch it here as well. http://www.netvox.com.tw/big5/cpjs/mp3/mp303.htm

First of April this year is indeed a great day for compressed audio on portables! (This thread really should be moved to the News section...)

I think that "first april" is the keyword here.

But it's nice anyway.

This is all ground breaking news each piece should have it's own thread in the news section

Wow, this is shaping up to be quite a day for multimedia technology! In my ever-vigilant scouring of news-worthy events, I've already stumbled across the following:


[*]Late this afternoon BOSE announced a new DVD-A/SACD combination player with multi-codec audio/video playback, to include FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, AAC/MP4, DivX and MP3. No word yet on whether MPC playback is in the works, although the player is firmware upgradeable. A shelf price has yet to be announced, but as with BOSE's general policy, if you have to ask you can't afford it.


[*]3-Dimensional DivX was demonstrated this afternoon at a press luncheon. Let's just say this should be the next "big thing" in internet porn....


[*]Real4DOS 9.2.3 was released today. While RealNetworks have yet to offer any formal support for MS-DOS, a coder by the name of "Ghurkin" assembled his command-line RealAudio/Media decoder (with stdout) from bits of the Helix client, and an undisclosed number of Vlassic pickles.


[*]Another major company also found itself in a pickle today, when it was announced that Windows Media 9 had been successfully reverse-engineered by a dedicated group of Dutch psychology students. According to the group's leader, the breakthrough came when one of them renamed "wmplayer.EXE" to "wmplayer.WAV" and listened to the result. In a clear, rich voice she then heard Bill Gates chanting, "Number nine... Number nine... number nine...."

Sigh... we'll probably have to wait another year before we see anything comparable.

- M.

just to make things straigth
This was an aprils fool joke,


If you turn some names and switches backwards, you will se names like fake, joke, aprils fool. etc etc

There is NO hacked firmware for ipod
There is NO new psytell command line encoder