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AAC Put To The Test
technology is sexy writes "Following the increasing popularity of AAC in online music stores and the growing amount of implementations in software and hardware, the format is now being put to the test. How well does Apple's implementation fare against Ahead Nero, Sorenson or the Open Source FAAC at the popular bitrate of 128kbps? Find out for yourself and help by submitting the
results. You can find instructions on how to participate here. The best AAC codec gets to face MP3, MP3Pro, Vorbis, MusePack and WMA in the next test. Previous test results at 64kbps can be found here."
You mean the DRM features that allow me to rip my own CD's to AAC and copy the resultant files to any and all computers or players (that understand them) and play them back?
Or how about the DRM feature that allows me to export bought AAC's to aiff and then convert them to MP3/OGG/AAC/.wav/.au etc and do with them what I please?
True, Apple's TMS is selling AAC's that have a DRM-like "inconvenience protection" on them but it's not _inherent_ to the AAC format, nor does it affect the sound quality vs. file size questions.
(In any case, we _should_ be cheering for any company that's actually trying to give us quite reasonably limited freedom with copyrighted material, while satisfying the RIAA/MPAA etc.)
This experiment is really designed to test which codec overall sounds better to the average user, for an arbitrary and inconsistent range of hardware setups, acoustic environments, and listening preferences (e.g. do I pay more attention to the primary beat or to the background harmony). I wouldn't place any value on this test other than to choose which codec I might choose if I wanted to please the ignorant consumer (a valid market, of course!). It does nothing to address how accurately a codec reproduces the artist's original sound.
I'll put a lot more stock in the Report on the MPEG-2 AAC Stereo Verification Tests put together by David Meares (BBC), Kaoru Watanabe (NHK), Eric Scheirer (MIT Media Labs) for the ISO. And the other MPEG Audio Public Documents.
"I'd hazard a guess that most people that encode with ogg-vorbis do a better ripping and encoding job, though."
Only because right now you'd have to know a thing or two about the intricacies of digital music to have ever heard the phrase "ogg vorbis." If a big on-line music player were to standardize on this format instead of MP3 and it too becomes the common man's format, you can be sure the quality of ogg files will go down just as well.
There's nothing inherent in AAC that makes it DRM friendly. Its the quicktime wrapper thats DRM friendly. It would not be difficult to slap some form of DRM on MP3s, you just wouldn't get that many users because none of the MP3 players would support it out-of-the-box. People want to be able to fire up their winamp (or *shudder* realplayer, wmp, etc) and play the files without hassal. SInce iTunes is the most popular mac audio player, its much easier to add DRM to a format that hasn't been used much. Players will implement fairplay and authorize tracks. Apple could have done the same damn thing with MP3s, called them something other tham mp3s and it would have worked perfectly fine.
AAC _is_ technically superior to MP3. The problem is we've had around 10 years now to refine and perfect our MP3 encoders while free/cheap AAC encoders are just coming onto the market. Give it time, once it reaches its prime it will provide quality that I'm sure will undeniably rival MP3.