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Topic: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ? (Read 91568 times) previous topic - next topic
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how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Guys i went through faac site at sourceforge, and i found faac version 1.29 uploaded at 2017-07-17, did someone already try it ? How's the quality guys ? Is there some improvement from previous version (1.28-mod) ?

Note : I got it from here => https://sourceforge.net/projects/faac/files/faac-src/faac-1.29/
qaac -cvbr 0 -he

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #1
Based on the commit history, I wouldn't expect the output quality to vary much, if at all, from the version released in 2009.  The code changes seem related to security bugs, compilation fixes, etc.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #2
Did you try it? I mean try to use it? Not just look at their commit history at sourceforge, with the gear that i have right now, it doesn't really fit for listening test, that's why I'm asking for someone that would try it for me, so i can get an idea that there is quality improvement over the last version...
qaac -cvbr 0 -he

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #3
And @Heliologue just explained, there have been no quality related changes since 2009.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #4
Encode the same file with both encoders and check if the stream is identical. Could be the only difference in the output file is the version number in the header. The rest of the changes are probably bugfixes that have nothing to do with the outputfile.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #5
I just released faac 1.29.5 with a few real changes.
Encoding is definitely much faster and quality may also be better with many samples, definitely worth trying.

Also, I just noticed there is noise coding available and it always was a part of standard AAC LC.
Apparently I totally missed it back in the days.
I will try to develop this thing for upcoming releases, it can give a real quality boost, especially at lower bitrates.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #6
It's great to see some work on FAAC again after such a long time! Especially as you're actually trying to improve quality. Thanks @knik! Looking forward to future improvements! :)

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #7
Thanks enzo!
It looks like faac is missing two key AAC features: intensity stereo and perceptual noise substitution, it will be interesting to hear how it performs after implementing these.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #8
Is the Command Line Switches changed in FAAC 1.29?

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #9
It looks like faac is missing two key AAC features: intensity stereo and perceptual noise substitution...

LAME MP3 encoder has no intensity stereo nor PNS ... and yet it's better than FAAC at 64-96 kbps. 
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/kamedo2/20111029/1319840519

I'm not a dev but as far as I know PNS is only useful at 32-64 kbps. And that ranges belongs to HE-AAC. There is no reason to use LC-AAC instead of HE-AAC at such low bitrates. Intensity may be useful at 96 kbps  and lower ... maybe or maybe not. That will depend how smart implementation will be.   :-X


Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #11
Quote
LAME MP3 encoder has no intensity stereo nor PNS ... and yet it's better than FAAC at 64-96 kbps. 
Actually, that may be true, faac-1.28 probably is slightly worse than lame @64-96 but what's the point to argue about such ancient versions.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #12
I just released faac 1.29.5 with a few real changes.
Encoding is definitely much faster and quality may also be better with many samples, definitely worth trying.
Congratulations!
The encoding speed improvement was confirmed on my Ryzen 5 1600X. The real output bitrate was strange when the input was a short stereo white noise file. It was not so on other files.

 

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #13
Why the foobar's parametres "--mpeg-vers 4 --q 500 -w - -o %d" (working in FAAC 1.28) doesn't work in FAAC 1.29.6?

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #14
Why the foobar's parametres "--mpeg-vers 4 --q 500 -w - -o %d" (working in FAAC 1.28) doesn't work in FAAC 1.29.6?
That may be related to a recent change not to overwrite existing files by default. --overwrite option enables it.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #15
Congratulations!
The encoding speed improvement was confirmed on my Ryzen 5 1600X. The real output bitrate was strange when the input was a short stereo white noise file. It was not so on other files.
Thanks!
Yes, the bitrates aren't very predictable, I think I need to develop some proper psymodel, that should improve encoding in general and possibly also the bitrates. We'll see.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #16
I really wanted to give a try to a new encoder.

First things first.

"faac.exe --long-help" doesn't work. It took 10 minutes to figure out that it was "--help-long".  It's not documented a proper way.

It's not funny. I deleted a files and never came back to it.

Bye.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #17
"faac.exe --long-help" doesn't work. It took 10 minutes to figure out that it was "--help-long".  It's not documented a proper way.
Bye.
You are a bit late, it was reported already:
https://github.com/knik0/faac/issues/1
And a fix was commited:
https://github.com/knik0/faac/commit/8064528230ac5bb7d3911b79716d6b60430f94ee

But thanks for you your invaluable help anyway.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #18
The encoding speed improvement was confirmed on my Ryzen 5 1600X. The real output bitrate was strange when the input was a short stereo white noise file. It was not so on other files.
It was strange on ordinary music tracks, sorry. Setting -b 200 sounds like a 0.9kHz LPF, and the filesize is tiny.

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #19
It was strange on ordinary music tracks, sorry. Setting -b 200 sounds like a 0.9kHz LPF, and the filesize is tiny.
Indeed, it's just unusable. Thanks for finding the problem!
It definitely has to be sorted out.


Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #21
Hooray! It was fixed!



Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #23
Thanks for the update @knik
qaac -cvbr 0 -he

Re: how good is the quality of new faac 1.29 (2017-07-17) ?

Reply #24