I am interested in what the future of this codec is. I realize that it was developed truely for educational purposes to show how to code a aac encoder/decoder and isn't really tuned much. But I think it would be really great to have a open source aac codec that could produce comparable quality to Nero's. I wouldn't be asking this question at all but I was browsing the cvs today and I noticed that there was quite a bit of activity lately. Anyhow, I am not trying to pressure anyone into developing this more I would just like to know what the current status on the project is and if there would ever be a chance that we would see an open source alternative to Nero's aac. And I don't mean any disrespect to what Ivan and menno have done, just curious.

I tried to summarize the recent developments in FAAC and FAAD/FAAD2 and how to keep track of them in some News forum postings on the SourceForge project page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/

You can find them if you click on "comments" to the almost two-year old thread that Menno started about "Latest News".

In my opinion the future of the FAAC project only depends on the interest and engagement of developers that are willing to learn something new, because basically everything you need is already there. If FAAC could ever sound the same as Nero AAC isn't even that important in my mind, since it's already regularly used in the MPEG4IP project that will become more important in the next months probably, at least for everyone who wants to stream MP4 files. And there is of course still enough "headroom" to tune FAAC for lower bitrates that are important for this purpose.

For FAAD2 there also seems to be a demand for someone who is "willin' an' able" to implement SBR in this decoder, as Menno seems to rely on the Coding Technologies implementation for Nero's applications, see http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.....ST&f=13&t=8093.

Well, thank you for your reply. I decided to check out faac myself. I don't think anyone has compiled and released any binaries for quite some time now, so I downloaded the latest source code and compiled it myself. Anyhow, it seemed to compile alright gave me a few error messages. Anyhow, I encoded a test file and it sounded pretty decent at 128kbps. One thing that I did notice though was that it was quite slow, it took 3min to encode a 4min song. I think this is probably my fault though, time to investigate what all those error messages were, that was probably the problem.

Just to avoid boring double postings etc.: did you ask about FAAC on Audiocoding.com with the user name "Simon Robbins" today?



You could have tried Roberto's compile on RareWares, but it also does not incorporate the latest changes by knik from March 2003.



No, see my answer in the Audiocoding.com forum: FAAC is very slow.

I will compile new versions of everything at RareWares as soon as I return home (next Sunday, prolly)

You misunderstood my posting, Hans!

I didn't say Menno is using CT's code. I said that he is working on a closed code that belongs to Ahead. Ahead demanded exclusivity in the SBR decoding part (since they couldn't do the same for the AAC decoding part - it's FAAD2). That's why Menno (probably) won't upload his SBR decoding sources to the FAAD2 CVS.

It's a completely in-house developed solution - CT only licensed them the technology, not the SBR code.

Just to make some clarifications here - Ahead is >not< using Coding Technologies (CT) implementation of SBR (High Efficiency AAC) neither for encoder nor for decoder. Complete code was developed inhouse.

Nope, wasn't me.



Oh, I wasn't aware of that, I suppose I didn't see the date, I thought it was an older one that was being distributed with mpeg4ip. But now that I look the date was 2003-02-23.



Ah, so I might not have been any fault of mine, amazing.



Thank you very much.

OK, thanks for clarification.

rjamorim, I just got your latest compile of faac and it is significantly faster then the one I compiled. Thanks.