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Topic: Best AAC encoder (Read 55155 times) previous topic - next topic
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Best AAC encoder

Reply #1 –
I'd go for Nero. 128 or 160, 192 kb/s/stereo is a waste of your harddisk space...

Best AAC encoder

Reply #2 –
iTunes won the AAC listening test @ 128kbps..

Best AAC encoder

Reply #3 –
yes but later versions of itunes had degraded audio quality.
Sven Bent - Denmark

Best AAC encoder

Reply #4 –
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yes but later versions of itunes had degraded audio quality.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=247416"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Only if you can listen above 16kHz.

Best AAC encoder

Reply #5 –
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yes but later versions of itunes had degraded audio quality.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=247416"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Hmm.. except the high frequency "issue" (which has been blown out of proportions on this board) the overall quality in QT 6.5.1 is better than the previous versions.

Best AAC encoder

Reply #6 –
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the overall quality in QT 6.5.1 is better than the previous versions.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=248490"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Give me proof.

And I don't know what you understand by "out of proportions", but we have listening test results from board members showing that it indeed degraded quality. Where are your test results showing quality didn't degrade all that much?

Best AAC encoder

Reply #7 –
Does AAC have a LAME equivalent? Most people seem to use either itunes or Nero (from the sounds of things), but does anyone consider one to be "better" than the other?

If so, is there a specific verision that is preferred overall (e.g. LAME 3.90.3 rather than earlier or later variants)
<==== Hydrogen Audio Bomb

Best AAC encoder

Reply #8 –
Quote
Does AAC have a LAME equivalent?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=249421"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


No. Both iTunes and Nero offer high quality encoding, and neither seems to be obviously better than the other (quality-wise).

Best AAC encoder

Reply #9 –
What about FAAC? I've heard a bit about them and they seem to be mildly popular around the place.

I don't know too much about AAC, but I'm interested in ABXing it sometime, like OGG vs LAME vs AAC vs MPC :/
<==== Hydrogen Audio Bomb

Best AAC encoder

Reply #10 –
Quote
What about FAAC? I've heard a bit about them and they seem to be mildly popular around the place.

I don't know too much about AAC, but I'm interested in ABXing it sometime, like OGG vs LAME vs AAC vs MPC :/
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[a href="http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=21904]Like this?[/url]
"Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored."
—Aldous Huxley

Best AAC encoder

Reply #11 –
Well I haven't seen that till now. Interesting. What's Vorbis aoTuV?

I found on rjamorim's site that FAAC doesn't score to well at all. In this test:

http://www.rjamorim.com/test/aac128v2/results.html

Its surprising how well iTunes did at 128kbps CBR, even beat Nero VBR which had an average of 140kbps 

magic75 said: "Now that was a surprise... Lame as good as AAC??? Anyone expected that?"

Did he expect LAME to beat AAC? Or AAC to beat LAME?

BTW, what type of encoder does Winamp 5.05 use for AAC? It has two types: Raw and MP4 available. Have they ever been tested? I thought MP4 and AAC were the same, or is MP4 AAC an AAC encoded file in an MP4 container?

Bloody confusing lossy formats and technicalities, its enough to make me stick to .WAV's
<==== Hydrogen Audio Bomb

Best AAC encoder

Reply #12 –
Quote
magic75 said: "Now that was a surprise... Lame as good as AAC??? Anyone expected that?"

Did he expect LAME to beat AAC? Or AAC to beat LAME?


AAC to beat lame, for sure.

Remember AAC was developed to be the successor of MP3. So, you expect it to deliver better quality.

Also, the MPEG forum touts that AAC has 30% efficiency over MP3 - that is, it should sound the same at bitrates 30% smaller.

I think an explanation to what happened is that the Lame developers did a wonderful job taking the MP3 format to its limits. Lame is an excellent encoder and is already taking nearly the most of what the format can give. Most AAC encoders, on the other hand, are just past their infancy and have lots of room for improvements. It's also worth mentioning AAC is reportedly much harder to tweak than MP3.

Quote
BTW, what type of encoder does Winamp 5.05 use for AAC? It has two types: Raw and MP4 available. Have they ever been tested? I thought MP4 and AAC were the same, or is MP4 AAC an AAC encoded file in an MP4 container?
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=249853"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


"is MP4 AAC an AAC encoded file in an MP4 container" <- that's correct.

Winamp uses the Dolby encoder.

And no, I didn't test Winamp AAC. I kinda repent for it now, but this test's discussion became so catastrophic at one point, with people tampering polls, people getting into flame wars about what encoder to feature, and so on, that I decided it was enough and went with only the 5 encoders that were already chosen by then.

It wasn't my biggest mistake when conducing tests, though. Thankfully.

Regards;

Roberto.

Best AAC encoder

Reply #13 –
Quote
Well I haven't seen that till now. Interesting. What's Vorbis aoTuV?


Vorbis aoTuV is essentially Ogg Vorbis 1.0.1 with special tunings done by Aoyumi.  Most of these tunings are now in Ogg Vorbis 1.1.

Quote
BTW, what type of encoder does Winamp 5.05 use for AAC? It has two types: Raw and MP4 available. Have they ever been tested? I thought MP4 and AAC were the same, or is MP4 AAC an AAC encoded file in an MP4 container?


The AAC encoder in Winamp 5.05 seems to have problems with castanets.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=24285

I abxed it successful up to 224 kbps.

Best AAC encoder

Reply #14 –
Quote
"is MP4 AAC an AAC encoded file in an MP4 container" <- that's correct.

Winamp uses the Dolby encoder.

And no, I didn't test Winamp AAC. I kinda repent for it now, but this test's discussion became so catastrophic at one point, with people tampering polls, people getting into flame wars about what encoder to feature, and so on, that I decided it was enough and went with only the 5 encoders that were already chosen by then.

It wasn't my biggest mistake when conducing tests, though. Thankfully.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=249856"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Thanks for clearing that up. Any thing musical these days is very dependent on the situation. There's zillions of different encoders, decoders, transcoders, cd burners and software such as Nero that can all have an effect on apparent sound quality.

Not to mention the effect different sound cards, speakers or headphones can have 

I was thinking about encoding all my songs into AAC (using Winamp), but that was before I came across EAC, LAME and FLAC (as well as a million other lossy and lossless formats).

What version of LAME was used in that test? I'm currently using LAME 3.90.3 (which supposedly has a lot of backing around the audio community as being the "best"). But I think I saw a test around here somewhere that suggested LAME 3.96.1 may be better 

BTW, what is a container? I read a bit about it on the FLAC sites faq, but the concept still seems weird to me.

The current idea I have is that a container is just like a second format with added stuff that allows tags.

Is MP3 natively in a "container"?? 

Quote
The AAC encoder in Winamp 5.05 seems to have problems with castanets.


What do you mean? Castanets as in the musical instruments? 
<==== Hydrogen Audio Bomb

Best AAC encoder

Reply #15 –
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Is MP3 natively in a "container"?? 


I'd say the time mp3 born is before the concept of a "container", so mp3 is just raw encoded stream with added feature such as id3tag.

Best AAC encoder

Reply #16 –
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What do you mean? Castanets as in the musical instruments? 
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Yeah.  There are at least two killer samples that have castanets in it.  Winamp AAC had some problems encoding them transparently, even up to 224 kbps.

Best AAC encoder

Reply #17 –
Quote
What version of LAME was used in that test?


3.96.1

Quote
I'm currently using LAME 3.90.3 (which supposedly has a lot of backing around the audio community as being the "best"). But I think I saw a test around here somewhere that suggested LAME 3.96.1 may be better 


3.96.1 wasn't as tested as 3.90.3. But I believe it's quality is probably on par with 3.90.3. I really don't believe quality degraded a lot, if it degraded. And it has the advantage of being much faster.

I use 3.96.1 for my MP3 encodings.

Best AAC encoder

Reply #18 –
QuickTime 6.5.2 and iTunes 4.7 were both released today with claimed quality improvements...

Best AAC encoder

Reply #19 –
Quote
3.96.1 wasn't as tested as 3.90.3. But I believe it's quality is probably on par with 3.90.3. I really don't believe quality degraded a lot, if it degraded. And it has the advantage of being much faster.

I use 3.96.1 for my MP3 encodings.
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Beliefs don´t count, you must provide proof that quality did not degraded a lot or a little.


(just kidding  )

Best AAC encoder

Reply #20 –
Quote
Quote
Is MP3 natively in a "container"?? 


I'd say the time mp3 born is before the concept of a "container", so mp3 is just raw encoded stream with added feature such as id3tag.
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MPEG Layer 3 streams are most commonly contained in MPEG 1 containers.  However Mp3 can also be muxed into MPEG 2, MPEG 2.5, MPEG 4 or Matroska conatiners, perhaps there are some other which I missed.  Mp3 streams muxed into MPEG 2 or MPEG 2.5 containers usually still have the .mp3 extension.  AFAIK every type of multimedia file (maybe every file period) has to have some sort of container.
gentoo ~amd64 + layman | ncmpcpp/mpd | wavpack + vorbis + lame

Best AAC encoder

Reply #21 –
There is no multimedia container wrapping MP3 streams. They can be considered RAW, since it's just the compressed information and frame headers, pretty much like ADIF AAC.

I don't consider frame headers a "container"

Also, if it was inside the MPEG "container", you would need an MPEG demultiplexer to playback MP3.

MPEG 1 and 2 don't have native containers. The video and audio streams are just multiplexed together, they are not wrapped inside something else.

MPEG 2.5 is just an extension to the MP3 standard for very low sampling frequencies. It doesn't make sense to speak about it as another MPEG multimedia portfolio.

Best AAC encoder

Reply #22 –
Quote
MPEG 1 and 2 don't have native containers. The video and audio streams are just multiplexed together, they are not wrapped inside something else.
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Are you sure about this ?

SebastianG

Best AAC encoder

Reply #23 –
Quote
Are you sure about this ?

SebastianG
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That's what I have always seen in multiplexers. With several different ways to multiplex the streams: PS, TS, etc.

Best AAC encoder

Reply #24 –
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That's what I have always seen in multiplexers. With several different ways to multiplex the streams: PS, TS, etc.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=259874"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I guess I did not understand what you mean by "native container". AFAIK the elementary streams are somehow packetized and then muxed on a packet basis.

SebastianG