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Topic: QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc. (Read 685966 times) previous topic - next topic
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QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #900 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
I'm pretty sure that Apple Encoder / QAAC supports HEv2? As everything I have encoded using below 64kbps @ mono with HE (in both QAAC and with iTunes itself) has been reported as "Profile: High-Efficiency v2" and is still reported as "Stereo" which might be because iTunes still counts Parametric Stereo as Stereo? dBPowerAMP is reporting it as AAC (LC) + SBS + PS.

It's quite normal for an AAC decoder to treat mono HE-AAC as HE-AACv2 and even decoding as stereo, since detecting PS (which is implicitly signaled) requires full parsing of AAC bitstream beforehand.
IIRC, mediainfo does full parsing of AAC frame to show profile/num channels/sample rate or something. Go get mediainfo and see what it says.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #901 –
This is getting rather confusing. I tried to do a test encode of Harry Potter og Fangen fra Azkaban using FDK AAC with VBR Q1 settings and HEv2 to compare, but iTunes does not seem to recognize this one at all. It's being reported as "Profile: Low Complexity" and "Mono" instead of Stereo. And reported as 22,050 kHz even though dBPowerAMP is reporting it as AAC (LC) + SBR + PS with 44,100 kHz. So it seems like it's using HEv2 and iTunes is simply not able to play it back as HEv2 so it resolves to playing only the Low Complexity portion of the file, hence why it's being reported as Profile: Low Complexity, Mono and only 22,050 kHz sampling rate?

I thought Apple was supporting decoding of HEv2 in both iTunes and iOS these days? How come Apple is tagging their own SBR + PS encodes as High-Efficiency v2 and yet iTunes seems to not be able to figure out HEv2 from FDK AAC encoder at all?


What's even more funny is that from this small test, where iTunes is playing back the audiobook as mono instead of stereo or parametric stereo I find it to actually sound better. I actually like the sound of this 40 kbps AAC LC Mono file from FDK AAC more than the Apple Lossless source file I'm converting it from. My only problem is that Apple Encoder / QAAC seems to automatically enforce parametric stereo when I do the matrix-preset mono in combination with --he? How do I end up with HE/HEv2 with actual mono instead of parametric stereo? Do I need to downmix the Apple Lossless beforehand and then try to convert with --cvbr 32 -q2 --he?



EDIT: I will try and grab mediainfo

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #902 –
According to MediaInfo this is what I can gather;



Spoiler (click to show/hide)


Compared to my test with FDK AAC:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)



What I can gather from all this is that you are absolutely correct. It does not seem like Apple Encoder / QAAC is using HEv2, but HE with Parametric Stereo (I thought PS was a part of HEv2? But I might be mistaken). Why is Apple reporting their own encoded HE with Parametric Stereo as "High Efficiency v2" is they are not HEv2 at all? Seems like a rather confusing and stupid thing to do. And shouldn't iTunes and iOS devices be able to decode HEv2 at all? Considering the FDK AAC with HEv2 is clearly being played back without the HEv2 portion, and without parametric stereo.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #903 –
Hmm.. Seems like it's not possible to go from ALAC Stereo to ALAC Mono using QAAC? So I used dBPowerAMP to go from ALAC Stereo to AIFF Mono and then I used the *.aif files to make Apple Lossless and then I finally had my audiobooks playing in mono, which I actually prefer compared to stereo.

But sadly, when I'm taking Apple Lossless Mono and convert using --cvbr 32 -q2 --he I'm still ending up with parametric stereo....

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #904 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
It does not seem like Apple Encoder / QAAC is using HEv2, but HE with Parametric Stereo (I thought PS was a part of HEv2? But I might be mistaken).

No. Apple encoder doesn't support PS. HE + PS = HEv2.
Quote
Why is Apple reporting their own encoded HE with Parametric Stereo as "High Efficiency v2" is they are not HEv2 at all?

I explained the reason. To reliably detect implicitly signaled PS, you need full parsing. And they just don't.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #905 –
Is there any way for me to make QAAC and iTunes / iOS to not upsample my AAC HE mono files to stereo using parametric stereo? It sounds much worse compared to just playing it mono for audiobooks..

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #906 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
Hmm.. Seems like it's not possible to go from ALAC Stereo to ALAC Mono using QAAC? So I used

It's possible, but you need to explicitly add "-b 16" or something if you want ALAC, since floating point format is not supported by ALAC.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #907 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
Is there any way for me to make QAAC and iTunes / iOS to not upsample my AAC HE mono files to stereo using parametric stereo?

To make it clear, it's the decoder that converts mono HE-AAC to stereo even when PS not present in the stream. Therefore, there's nothing qaac can do for it. And it seems that all of libavcodec (ffmpeg), faad, and Apple CoreAudio decodes mono HE-AAC to stereo.
Quote
It sounds much worse compared to just playing it mono for audiobooks..

What are you comparing to? Do you have a decoder that decodes mono HE-AAC to mono and comparing against it? Or what?
There's no reason for sound quality degrading when mono HE-AAC is decoded as stereo instead of mono.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #908 –
I'm only comparing to having AAC at about the same bitrate outputted in mono, I did just try to compare AAC LC @ 32 kbps @ Mono to AAC HC @ 32 kbps @ PS Stereo and the first sound way better for spoken word in my opinion. I seem to notice a tad bit more artefacts with the AAC LC @ 32 kbps compared to AAC HE @ 32 kbps but the added halo / echo effect of the parametric stereo is far more noticeable compared to having a few hiccups and pops when the audiobook reader is starting to crank up his voice levels.

With that said, I don't blame it all on the parametric stereo itself, as I said earlier I find downmixing from stereo to mono on the source (lossless) files also to be a improvement. The spoken words from the audiobook become more focused and easier to hear when being outputted in mono instead of stereo. I gave my girlfriend (not tech-heavy at all) a small portion of the audiobook to compare;

#1: cVBR 32 kbps HE (PS Stereo playback)
#2: cVBR 32 kbps LC Mono (Mono playback)
#3: cVBR 32 kbps LC Stereo (Stereo playback)


And she couldn't really tell #1 and #3 apart, but preferred the second one without question.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #909 –
Your wording of "PS stereo" is a lot confused.
Mono HE-AAC file created by qaac has nothing to do with PS. Although it is decoded into a stereo file containing two channels, PS tool is not used on decoding since PS is not present in the stream.
It's just that mono output is copied into 2 channels, and it should exactly sound like mono.
In other words, if you are listening to the encoded result of qaac, what you are hearing is not artifact of PS but artifact of SBR.

Having said that, if you prefer LC result, then just stick to it.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #910 –
I'm not that good with the technical portions of audio and encoders, so it might be that I'm confusing things. With SBR / PS out of the question I'm testing out with tVBR instead (had rolled out tVBR as I thought HE was preferred below 64 kbps) and it seems like --tVBR 9 -q2 --matrix-preset mono is providing very good performance for audiobooks.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #911 –
Just a small heads-up. QAAC and QAAC64.exe does not seem to be working win Windows 10 RTM. I tried using it with dBPowerAMP was well as utilising the .exe directly through an elevated command prompt and it claims that I'm lacking coreaudiotoolbox, but I have the latest iTunes 64-bit and QuickTime installed. I tried to manually copy the coreaudiotoolbox.dll into the QAAC64.exe folder but then it start to give me various coreaudiotoolbox errors instead.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #912 –
You need to put the required DLLs in the QTfiles folder, not the same folder as qaac.exe. Does doing that fix the error?

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #913 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
I tried to manually copy the coreaudiotoolbox.dll into the QAAC64.exe folder but then it start to give me various coreaudiotoolbox errors instead.

CoreAudioToolbox.dll is not enough. You need 10 DLLs from Apple Application Support package. It should be easier to use makeportable.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #914 –
Quote from: Aleron Ives on
You need to put the required DLLs in the QTfiles folder, not the same folder as qaac.exe. Does doing that fix the error?

Well actually, both should work.
 

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #915 –
Quote from: nu774 on
Quote from: RamGuy on
I tried to manually copy the coreaudiotoolbox.dll into the QAAC64.exe folder but then it start to give me various coreaudiotoolbox errors instead.

CoreAudioToolbox.dll is not enough. You need 10 DLLs from Apple Application Support package. It should be easier to use makeportable.


What am I supposed to do with the makeportable cmd? Simply running it as administrator didn't seem to do much.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #916 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
Quote from: nu774 on
Quote from: RamGuy on
I tried to manually copy the coreaudiotoolbox.dll into the QAAC64.exe folder but then it start to give me various coreaudiotoolbox errors instead.

CoreAudioToolbox.dll is not enough. You need 10 DLLs from Apple Application Support package. It should be easier to use makeportable.


What am I supposed to do with the makeportable cmd? Simply running it as administrator didn't seem to do much.


Hi,

Download iTunesSetup.exe or QuickTimeInstaller.exe put it into a folder, copy makeportable.cmd into that folder, right click makeportable.cmd and select "Open" after a few seconds you will have a new folder called "QTfiles", if you used the 64bit version of iTunes executable you'll also have the folder "QTfiles64". Inside the qaac folder there are 2 folders called "x64" and "x86" copy the folder "QTfiles" into "x86" and "QTfiles64" into "x64". Now you can use your favourite software to encode your tracks to aac :-)

qaac works with Windows10. I'm using it without problems.

Hope this info could help you.

Excuse me about my english.

Cheers.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #917 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
What am I supposed to do with the makeportable cmd? Simply running it as administrator didn't seem to do much.

You also have to copy the itunes6464setup.exe/QuickTimeInstaller.exe in the extracted folder, directly next to the makeportable.cmd.
7-zip needs to be installed or the '7z.exe' has to be copied there too.
Then fire the makeportable.cmd.
The 10 dlls get extracted to newly created subdirectories.

Code: [Select]
folder_xyz/
          makeportable.cmd
          itunes6464setup.exe
          7z.exe

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #918 –
Thanks! Will try that when I get home. Hopefully I will get QAAC-working again to convert my ALAC ripped audiobooks without me needing to transfer everything to my HTPC running Windows 8.1.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #919 –
I was able to run the makeportable and got the QTFiles folder, but it's still not working?

http://bildr.no/view/Rm5HVXY0

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #920 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
I was able to run the makeportable and got the QTFiles folder, but it's still not working?

http://bildr.no/view/Rm5HVXY0

You need QTfiles64 (created from iTunes6464Setup.exe) for qaac64, and place it like this:
Code: [Select]
C:\Path\To\qaac64.exe
C:\Path\To\QTfiles64\ASL.dll
C:\Path\To\QTfiles64\CoreAudioToolbox.dll
           :

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #921 –
Makeportable does not give me QTFiles64, only QTFiles? Renaming the folder to QTFiles64 I only get this ERROR: 193 CoreAudioToolbox.dll

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #922 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
Makeportable does not give me QTFiles64, only QTFiles? Renaming the folder to QTFiles64 I only get this ERROR: 193 CoreAudioToolbox.dll

Are you trying with iTunes 64bit?

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #923 –
I'm using the itunes64setup.exe


EDIT:

Extracting the installer using 7zip shows that it actually lacks the AppleApplicationSupport64.exe that makeportabale is looking for. Seems like Apple removed it from the latest iTunes64setup.exe?


EDIT2:

It seems like one should never relay on Filehippo.com for installers.. The download directly from Apple contains the AppleApplicationSupport64.exe.. I have no clue why Filehippo would fiddle with the installer for whatever reason.


EDIT3:

It was the installer from Filehippo that was causing the issues. It installs iTunes 64-bit, but did not contain the AppleApplicationSupport64.exe for whatever reason.. When installing using iTunes64setup.exe that actually contains the AppleApplicationSupport64.exe everything is working as it should. No need for makeportable or anything.

QAAC: discussion, questions, feature requests, etc.

Reply #924 –
Quote from: RamGuy on
When installing using iTunes64setup.exe that actually contains the AppleApplicationSupport64.exe everything is working as it should. No need for makeportable or anything.

yeah, guess what, 'makeportable' is for low-footprint-installationfree-setups