New MPEG-4 AAC technical corrigendum
Reply #12 – 2003-01-09 23:48:58
Well, that's great, indeed... One of my friends wants all his CD collection (approx. 1400 CDs) have converted into lossy format which would be hardware compatible and of the highest possible quality. I managed him to switch from using MP3 (LAME 3.90.2 --alt-preset insane) into MP4/AAC. If he doesn't care for the extra file size of this LAME setting, he could also go for that, because there are of course much more MP3 hardware players available than AAC at the moment. To use AAC instead only makes sense if he wants to have a high sound quality with smaller files, maybe for a CD portable like Philips Expanium.But now I'm a bit confused. Would it be without problems? And what encoders to use to avoid incompatibility? He wants his collection to be playable on hardware, which supports AAC and/or MP4. I personally would prefer MP4... If he only uses PsyTEL AACENC.EXE (without the MPEG-4 appendix), there won't be any problems at all, because this codec produces MPEG-2 AAC files exclusively which can be played back on a compatible hardware player. Nero AAC can do the same, if he enables the "ISO bla....." option which also puts out MPEG-2 AAC files. At the moment there aren't any hardware players that can play *.mp4 audio files, as far as I know, so there's no reason to convert or produce them yet considering the hardware support. When those players will arrive some time, there's always the possibility to convert all existing AAC files to MP4 with mp4creator, even if they were written onto a non-rewritable CD (write the converted MP4 files from the CD to your HDD then).