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AAC Put To The Test

Posted by timothy on from the musical-ambitions dept.

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."

2 of 353 comments (clear)

  1. crap in, crap out by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Interesting
    just remember, every codec depends on the quality of what it is encoding. I haven't heard any AAC encoded music myself (i use uncompressed wav or 256khz mp3 myself), but Apple allegedly uses the master recordings to encode their files.

    Most mp3s or oggs you find out there are from someone's CD-Rom drive, who knows how the disc looked, or how much jitter there was. I have heard stories of people downloading songs to find a skip or two in the middle, or been an amalgam of two different files accidently spliced together.

    I'd hazard a guess that most people that encode with ogg-vorbis do a better ripping and encoding job, though.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  2. I care. by crapulent · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I care because I have not fallen for the "golden ears" fallacy. To me, 192kbps ABR lame-encoded sounds exactly like the original. I don't have super expensive speakers attached to the computer, nor do I have a fancy sound card (Creative Live 5.1.) Storing music losslessly is a waste of space to me. Sometimes I like to share music files and it's a heck of a lot easier and others are a heck of a lot more interested in trading compressed music compared to lossless files. And I can put a heck of a lot more of them on a CDR. And should I wish to listem to them in my MP3 player with limited memory, I'm sure as hell not going to use a lossless format.

    If YOU want to use up your hard drive space, internet bandwidth, and blank media with huge lossless encoded files, feel free. But don't get all smug and proclaim to not have any idea why anyone would not want to waste their resources.

    Oh, and I'm not going to touch that "mathematically lossless" crap, others have covered that already.