Re: exhale - Open Source USAC encoder
Reply #969 – 2021-10-02 13:00:15
Does this mean that I have to change my macOS audio player to string replace "xHE-AAC" with "USAC", even though I am using Apple's decoder, which calls itself that in the first place? My rough, uneducated guess is that, since you're talking about a trademark licensed third-party de coder which calls itself "xHE-AAC" and which, I assume, you didn't modify in any way (you just call it), you may be able to keep calling it the way you do. But when in doubt, please ask the trademark owners directly, especially since that question seems to have nothing to do with my en coder. By the way #1, over the last months I made sure that the audio files generated by exhale can be played back correctly by every xHE-AAC player (if not, please let me know). Again, the only reason why I cannot refer to exhale as an "xHE-AAC encoder" is that it doesn't support USAC's speech coding technology and, therefore, compressed speech sounds pretty bad at the lowest preset.... exhale in fact does not produce the same high quality results at very low bitrates, that you get from an "official" xHE-AAC encoder. By the way #2, I agree with this statement on content including speech, like Web radio and audio books, as explained above. But AFAIR, for general music content at 44.1 kHz, no blind comparison between exhale's CVBR mode 'a' (generated e.g. using NetRanger's binaries, without the CBR setting) and the corresponding VBR files of an "official" encoder (generated e.g. using the EZ CD Audio Converter) have been published on this forum. Since HA requires blind test evidence to back up such claims, I need to stress this. Chris