FAST AAC LC Enc. v2.0 (build Mar 4 2002)
Reply #1 – 2003-01-15 23:59:06
1. Is it safe enough to use the fastenc? If it's free of bugs except the afore mentioned, I could live with it. What about the quality? As it's the approx. same date as aacenc v2.15, I think maybe we could use it, because from some listening tests on the same samples we didn't hear anything wrong... I would guess that FastEnc hasn't been used that much as AACEnc or AACENC_MPEG4, and furthermore it's declared as a beta version by Ivan, as far as I know. So there might be some hidden problems, but as long as no one tries this program, they will remain hidden... I also tested it yesterday because of Speek's GUI that can use it besides the other two PsyTEL codecs and found it to be twice as fast as AACEnc on my old AMD 5x86/133 MHz. A small "bug" appeared when I tried to use my favorite -resample option that obviously is not known to FastEnc. But it was very interesting to see five different profiles shown in the DOS box while encoding, one of them being Scalable Sample Rate (SSR). B) So hopefully Ivan will read this and tell us if this profile is "for real" or only an error.2. What about ADTS header? Shall we disable it in the command line? We would like to have the compatibility with MP4 in the (near) future, as we believe it becomes world widespread format... Don't ever disable the headers in an AAC file, because you will of course get seeking errors then... So was this your idea and your file that "dony" on the audiocoding.com forum has troubles with now or are you "dony" himself maybe? If you want to convert AAC files to MP4, use Speek's GUI and mp4creator for many files and maybe Winamp's in_mp4.dll for a single file.3. What encoders, decoders, plugins for winamp and so on to use? Throw away in_aac.dll, it's too old and outdated by now, and download the newest plugins from John33's mirror of RareWares. If you need a seeking bar with MPEG-2 AAC files in Winamp, choose in_faad.dll, if not (because you want to convert all AAC files to MP4), install in_mp4.dll that can also seek through MP4 files, but not through AAC files. You already wrote that you and your friend did not find any sound problems with FastEnc, so you can probably stick to it. Did you read Ivan's PDF file about this codec and the inherent differences and speed optimizations compared to AACEnc? He also mentioned that there shouldn't be any problems normally...