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Topic: What AAC profile should I use? (Read 13220 times) previous topic - next topic
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What AAC profile should I use?

I'm going to use Nero AAC to encode audio from several films. So I have a question, what AAC profile should I use to achieve the best quality in different cases?

1) 5.1 sound, 256kbits/sec;
2) 5.1 sound, 192kbits/sec;
3) stereo sound, 128kbits/sec;
4) stereo sound, 96kbits/sec;

My own opinion, based on the information that I have read on forums, is that the answers are:

1) LC-AAC;
2) HE-AAC;
3) LC-AAC;
4) LC-AAC;

Am I right?

P.S. Time of coding does not matter, the quality is at the first place.

What AAC profile should I use?

Reply #1 –
I guess you're gonna go for average bitrates instead of constant ones, since this is very recommendable in a movie soundtrack's case. For this kind of use even the ~192 kbit/s should be sufficient for being encoded to LC-AAC. Lots of opportunities for the codec to drastically vary its bitrates are offered here, while the specified average can still be maintained. Large parts of movies consist just of someone talking, a little noise or even complete silence, being very simple to encode. This allows the codec to encode actual music playback at bitrates far above the 192 kbit/s average one, resulting in high quality. Of course, you should stick to 2-pass encoding in order for AAC to be able to make the best possible use of its bitrate allocation.

What AAC profile should I use?

Reply #2 –
I'd probably use LC on all of those.

What AAC profile should I use?

Reply #3 –
Thanks for replies, I'll follow yours advices.

What AAC profile should I use?

Reply #5 –
My advise to movies with NeroDigital+ Audio encoder:

STEREO: 80kbps HE-AAC

5.1: 192kbps HE-AAC


Below this the quality is very annoying.

What AAC profile should I use?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: mgabi on
My advise to movies with NeroDigital+ Audio encoder:

STEREO: 80kbps HE-AAC

5.1: 192kbps HE-AAC


Below this the quality is very annoying.



Again: HE is not HiFi.
Use LC for movies - unless you are planning to watch them on your mobile!!!

What AAC profile should I use?

Reply #7 –
Quote from: dand on
Again: HE is not HiFi.

Please elaborate... 

Quote from: dand on
Use LC for movies - unless you are planning to watch them on your mobile!!!


In my opinion the choice totally depends on the bitrate. In my tests, 256kbits has mostly been enough for LC-AAC 5.1. If you want to go lower, then HE-AAC is probably better. The best thing to do would be to test and see how they sound. For some people SBR is annoying.

What AAC profile should I use?

Reply #9 –
Those of you who are saying "LC for all", at what bitrate would you transition over to HE (especially on 5.1 encodes)?

What AAC profile should I use?

Reply #10 –
Quote from: fields_g on
Those of you who are saying "LC for all", at what bitrate would you transition over to HE (especially on 5.1 encodes)?

Everything below an average of around 192 kbit/s would mean using HE-AAC in my case. This bitrate is my personal threshold for the switch between the AAC profiles.

Edit:
Stereo: I view HE-AAC as being useful below 80 kbit/s, though I still abstain from encoding to this format. That's due to low bitrates only being of interest for portable devices in my case, but these suffer from HE-AAC heavily eating batteries. In addition to this SBR isn't supported by aacgain, which is a very handy application to process content that's gonna be played back by portables. This leaves streaming as the only reasonable domain for HE-AAC to show its full potential.

What AAC profile should I use?

Reply #11 –
I'm using what the Nero Digtal CLI defaults to. I think this is the best choice regarding quality. However, I'd like to know what is chosen at what bitrate. Is there any info about that (v.1.1.34.2)?