Talk:Advanced Audio Coding/Archive 1

2004-08-06

Good article otherwise, but "As anyone who has used several different MP3 encoders will tell you" isn't neccessarily true, is a bit colloqial and isn't really neccessary anyway. So I've taken it out. pomegranate 01:12, Aug 6, 2004 (UTC)

Introduction no place for detailed discussion of Apple/EMI announcement?

I think the introductory paragraph goes into far too much detail on the Apple/EMI announcement to offer music on the iTunes Music Store without DRM. I would like to see the EMI/Apple announcement detail removed and dealt with (as it already is) on the iTunes entry itself. It's a largish deletion though -- any objections to me deleting it? (Fredhoysted 4 Apr 07: 0540 UTC)

For that matter, why is FairPlay DRM mentioned in the introduction? This is something imposed by Apple, not the format itself.131.107.0.72 16:17, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

I took a crack at rewriting the intro. The bit on DRM has been reduced to a paranthetical. Its only purpose here is to acknoledge that iTunes’ use of AAC is not 100% standards-based. Richcon 04:07, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

I took a swing at the history section. I'm not entirely sure what the mention of Nokia is intended to include here. Perhaps I've just forgotten. Woodinville (talk) 23:31, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

AAC protected by Patents?

Can anybody provide accurate information on whether AAC is patented? Mavros

See: http://www.vialicensing.com/

It most definately is. MPEG stuff is always heavily patented. This page presents it simply; I've added a link to it. User:Phil.a

Enhanced AAC?

Hi, I was reading an article about embedding chapters, images and urls in aac, a new possibility available in iTunes and new Ipods, perhaps someone could update the aac article ?`

There is info about it here ... http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/07/how_to_make_enh.html

- This article doesn't have anything to do with AAC, it's some iTunes specific stuff. "Enhanced AAC" would be HE-AAC/aacPlus.

- Agreed. AAC is an audio codec. That a particular file format (.m4a/.m4b) can contain both AAC audio and other material has nothing to do in an article about the AAC codec.

Hasn't AAC been improved to include Variable bit rate? --70.111.218.254 14:08, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Encoding Type Differences Amongst AAC Types

Some information on the differences between:

-AAC -AAC+ -EAAC+ -AAC++

Information besides, this is better.

---

Quality

I'd like to see a section on AAC quality.

Like how do these compare:

128kbps AAC vs. 128 kbps MP3

128kbps AAC vs. 192 kbps MP3

192kbps AAC vs. 192 kbps MP3

128kbps AAC vs. 64 and 128 kbps OGG

etc.

— Ilyanep (Talk) 18:40, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Thats not really feasible because there are so many different AAC and MP3 encoders, and so many different samples to use. At the moment, the two formats are essentially tied at 128k and above, with AAC becoming increasingly dominate at lower bitrates as the sheer technical advantage overwhelms MP3.

Current listening tests are showing a significant advantage towards AAC with the new nero encoder. General consensus seems to be that MP3 needs just under 1.5x the bitrate (more like 1.3-1.4x) for the same quality range in the 96-224kbits range. Above that it's hard to tell a difference anyway, so I'd take whatever results you see with a grain of salt, and obviously below that AAC wipes the floor with MP3. [hydrogenaudio.org] is a nice site if you aren't already aware of it (which is where these stats come from). On a side note, I added in a subsection on the new nero CLI encoder and cleaned up the list of media players that support it, everything supports it now really, so I replaced them with an entry for FAAD, one for mplayer because it's *nix and special, and a note about how everything supports it.

How does AAC stack up against 320kbps mp3s, the new standard mp3 bit rate?

This whole wiki seems to be full of itunes propaganda aimed at selling us on how great the AAC codec is. Guess what? its not that great. Look at the digital dj industry right now (May 2008), they are using 320kbps mp3's not AAC. We're talking tens of thousands of disc jockeys and other music industry professionals. There must be some good reason. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.73.13.224 (talk) 22:53, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

The article (not this talk page) is meant to be strictly informative about AAC, but AAC does have a special relationship to MP3, so there is going to be some comparison. What exactly is propaganda in the article? In any case, AAC's relative lack of popularity in one extreme niche market means nothing. To answer your questions, how does AAC compare to 320 kbps MP3, you need to post in another forum; this one is for discussion of the Wikipedia article on AAC only.

IMHO, the reasons digital DJs use MP3s are momentum, compatibility, and availability. The reason they use 320 kbps MP3 in particular are: 1. Higher bitrates are less burdensome now that disk space for a large library of music is affordable; and 2. Popular MP3 encoders (LAME, at least) now provide higher quality at 320 than at 256, because codec developers have concentrated on maximizing quality at the bitrates people care about - far more people care about 320 now than they did 8 years ago, when 128 was the norm and was where all the attention to optimization was applied. —mjb (talk) 23:19, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Other Players

The other players here is a little out of date. New versions of Real Player and MPlayer both include support for AAC encoded files. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zanthra (talk • contribs) 3:01, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Do we really want to include a list of every player supporting AAC? When support is relatively widespread, there is probably no point anymore in mentioning player names. --Gabriel Bouvigne (talk) 08:07, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

It's most likely the kind of thing where if we take it out, people will randomly start adding the info back in, more sloppily than before. The path of least resistance, unless someone wants to police the article and aggressively remove such additions, is to let them stay in. AAC awareness and support has to really be ubiquitous before that's no longer a problem. I say we revisit this topic in another year or two. —mjb (talk) 17:52, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Portable Devices

I can't find any evidence that indicates that the Sony Walkmen players mentioned in the article support AAC. Sony customer support even told me that they do not.

Don't know when comment was added but the Network Walman series does support AAC now. Wiki article on Walkman says so and also you can see here on Sony's own site for instance: http://support.sony-europe.com/DNA/Downloads/downloads.asp?l=en&c=WM&sc=NWH&f=FRM_NW_A1000

availability/popularity

"AAC was promoted as the successor to MP3 for audio coding at medium to high bit rates, though has yet to overtake the MP3 format or Microsoft's rival WMA format in terms of popularity or availability within the portable audio devices market."

I would be inclined to say that there may be more devices/programs that can play WMA than AAC, because of the popularity of iTunes and the iPod (market share numbers well in excess of 50%), AAC has overtaken the WMA format in terms of both popularity and availability within the portable market. Am I mistaken about it's prevalence?

Marketing Aspects and AAC popularity vs. MP3

The whole "Marketing Aspects" section should use some cleanup, as it contains some information that's just not true, or not quite true. Here's the points it claims:

"Ironically, AAC was promoted as the successor to MPEG 1.0 audio, layer III for audio coding at medium to high bitrates, although lower bitrates are its forte." 128kbit, which is the dominent bit rate for AAC-encoded audio (thanks to its being the default bit rate of iTunes and the iTunes Store), is a medium bitrate. AAC performs better than MP3 in listening tests all the way up to 192kbit/s. (Listening tests I've seen which say otherwise have compared LAME MP3 to iTunes AAC neglect to mention the fact that LAME is the best MP3 encoder out there and iTunes is *not* the best AAC encoder out there. I've even seen some of those tests of LAME vs. iTunes turn VBR on in LAME but leave it off in iTunes.) See http://www.soundexpert.info/ for tests involving a variety of encoders and bit rates.

"While much less popular than MP3..." That's arguable, and depends on your definition of "popular." Many have defined "popular" based on how many devices support it, but that's a rather silly metric. The majority of people buying portable music players are buying iPods, which means the iPod is the most popular one. The existance of other devices does not make them more popular.

Which is more popular, Windows, or the gazillions of UNIX-based operating systems out there? I'd be called a fool if I claimed UNIX were more popular than Windows because there are more UNIX varients out there than Windows varients. More people use Windows, so Windows is more popular.

So, popularity (AAC vs. MP3 vs. WMA vs. Ogg vs. whatever) should be defined by end-user choice, and for which *files* are more popular. Of the compressed music out there in the world, which format is most used? I don't really know. But there are three ways I see people getting music onto their computers and portable music players:

1. Buying it online. By far, that market is dominated by AAC by virtue of its use on the iTunes Store. Trailing behind AAC is WMA and MP3 (from the likes of eMusic).
2. Ripping it from a CD. Audiophiles will hand-tweak those settings and use the audio codec of choice, often LAME or AAC at high bit rates or other formats like Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Apple Lossless. Most people probably use the default settings of whatever jukebox software they're using, and iTunes seems to be the most popular jukebox software out there. So the "unwashed masses" are probably using AAC for the majority of their computer- and iPod-bound CD ripping.
3. Filesharing networks. From what I've seen, that market's dominated by MP3 for a variety of reasons.

Apple's dominence here isn't disputed, but what isn't known is how much music people get from which method. And that depends on who you listen to: RIAA doomsday proclamations (most of it is pirated) or kinder studies (most of it is legal). Note: I am not saying that MP3's use is relegated to only pirates. What I'm saying is that most people importing CDs for their iPods will use the default settings of iTunes, which is AAC.)

Now, there are other market segments where MP3 is most popular. Take Internet radio (MP3 most popular, HE-AAC playing on the fringe), or web page music and sound effects (MP3 due to its use in Flash).

On a final note, a blanket and confusing statement like "more popular" should probably be removed from here. Instead, defining what "popular" means and where AAC is more popular and where it is less popular would be more useful. More: online music sales. Probably more: music ripped from CDs. Less: Internet radio, filesharing networks, music and sound effects on web pages. Unknown: total amount of music in private collections. Will always be less: device support, since anything supporting AAC will also support MP3.

Richcon 06:18, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

2006-09-08 - FAAC and FAAD

Currently, both FAAD and FAAC links in this article directly, or indirectly link back to this article! That's a bit pointless. I'd like to know more about either, but they arn't really mentioned/described anywhere on W. I'm fine with them being described in this artilce, but they certainly shouldn't link back to this article without a description. I don't know anything about this, so someone knowledgeable should add a ==Free Advanced Audio Coding/Decoding== section. Thanks! +mwtoews 01:35, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

2006-11-01 - Quality Again

To the person who was concerned about quality, I havent found the exact bit rates you were looking for, but I have found an apple site which lists 3 comparisons done by dolby labs

• AAC compressed audio at 128 Kbps (stereo) has been judged by expert listeners to be “indistinguishable” from the original uncompressed audio source.*
• AAC compressed audio at 96 Kbps generally exceeded the quality of MP3 compressed audio at 128 Kbps. AAC at 128 Kbps provides significantly superior performance than does MP3 at 128 Kbps.*
• AAC was the only Internet audio codec evaluated in the range “Excellent” at 64 Kbps for all of the audio items tested in EBU listening tests.*
• Information provided by Dolby Labs.

Reference here http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/aac/ Timmah01 05:55, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'd have to disagree for classical music. I have to bump up the rate to at least 160 kbps for it to be "indistinguishable." And I certainly would not call it "excellent" at 64. That being said, it appears that other articles (Vorbis, WMA) have a "Listening Tests" or "Sound Quality" section. Perhaps something like that could be worked into this article. --W0lfie 18:38, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Right now, the article compares AAC with just MP3, there should at least be a comparison with Ogg Vorbis too then, and perhaps other big players. --70.111.218.254 14:12, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

By what metric, exactly, is Ogg Vorbis a "big player"? I mean, I read slashdot and use linux (among other OSes) etc, so I am familiar with it, but I doubt almost any non-geeky people have a clue as to what it is, or why they should use it. If AAC is to be compared with other codecs it should probably be against ones that are used more widely than OV, and we'll need some serious references on it. - JustinWick 18:54, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure if anyone cares anymore but i know that Vorbis uses a sort of noise floor, which means some music bottoms out and sounds analog instead of digital-ish with errors in the encoding. A lot of people find this less annoying than MP3 or AACs way of dealing with errors or hard to compress sections of music. It wouldn't be hard to put together some simple test results on specific sounds or passages. Mrsteveman1 02:31, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

2006-12-19 - "Summarize AAC at top of article please"

I came looking for a defination of what AAC actually is but couldn't find it. Can someone add an introduction to the article explaining what AAC before going into the heavy technical stuff? Philsy 11:32, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

2006-12-13 - "Proprietary format"

Can somebody explain what this means: "Although AAC requires a patent license, contrary to popular belief, it is not a proprietary format." I'm not sure I understand how it can require patent license, but not be proprietary. Wouldn't the assignee of the patent also be the proprietor of the format? Maybe I don't understand the definition, but I thought that something was "proprietary software" any time there is a clear "owner" of it, and that owner puts restrictions on it. Somebody with more knowledge please correct/inform me.  :-) --W0lfie 18:38, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand either. If it requires a license, it should be called "proprietary", even if streaming or broadcasting doesn't require a license...Sarenne 12:24, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

The main difference is that anyone can get the specification, that's what makes it an open format. I can grab the MPEG-4 spec and write my own encoder, however in doing so i still have to pay for the technology used because its patented. For comparison, if i wanted to write my own WMA encoder I probably couldn't even get a look at the spec, regardless of patents. In short, AAC is an open format but only because its a standard governed by MPEG LA. Mrsteveman1 02:36, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Article Cleanup Co-Ordination Point

Style Discussion Comment [2007-01-04] - IMHO having an automated bot promenently flag articles - yet provide no details of what the critera were - is not particularly helpful. Regarding the quote "You should use this section to discuss possible resolution of the problem and achieve consensus for action.": 'THE problem' implies a single, known problem; not a "list of possible problems". Besides the comments already on this discussion page (above), can any 'real human' provide some feedback on what specific problems (if any) there are with the content of this article? Editors could then use those issues for focusing any cleanup efforts... -Liberty 02:16, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Article is confusing? (2007-01-17)

I don't seem to understand the problem with this article. The lead section has links to anything that a non-techie wouldn't know about, and the rest either is of little interest, or requires people to learn the subject before reading. I had no difficulty reading the entire article, and I'm sure anyone who took the time to learn the terms and become familiar with the field would have no problems either, as the English used is not overly complex. This isn't an Encylopaedia for Dummies - many math/science articles are hopeless to comprehend without at least a masters degree in the subject, and there's nothing wrong with that - some things are just hard. - JustinWick 18:57, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Please post specific quality issues or clarfication requests on this page

Follow up to comments above; well, it's been a while, and there doesn't seem to be any specific feedback forthcoming. I'm removing the robot 'confusing' and 'cleanup' tags because they aren't helpful or needed (all wikipedia articles could be potentially confusing or may require "cleanup"; that's why wikipedia is editable). Specific issues/requests can be added to the bottom of this discussion page (in the way that wikipedia has always worked). - Liberty 22:12, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

AAC and MP3 comparison

The AAC improvements over MP3 section in the article does not explain in detail the way in which the high bit rate compression does the MP3 provides a lesser quality than AAC. In fact, I am highly skeptical about the argument pointed out in the article: "A natural side effect of the MP3 method is that it suffers a loss of information over time - bass frequencies which results in, often even to an untrained ear, distinguishable disfiguration of these frequencies." This particular argument was suggested in the article without further explanation and quote. I propose this particular section be suspended before any further clarification.

• I've removed that gibberish entirely. Unless there's something wrong with your storage medium, data does not change over time. As the data is not lost over time, MP3's quality cannot degrade over time as the text suggests. That is complete garbage written by someone who has no idea what they're talking about. -- Canar 03:36, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you!

Perhaps them meant that bass degraded as time went on through the particular recording when played back, rather than over time in its storage. -- Anonymous 29 July 2007

That's also ridiculous, theres no gradient that occurs over the course of a sample of sound that would result in the loss of bass frequencies over time. If I had to make a wild guess as to what they meant, its possible they were trying to say that MP3 encoders suffer from a loss of bass information when doing the time domain to frequency domain conversion. Thats a wild guess though. Mrsteveman1 03:21, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Alt. players - XBMC

I really think the text after XBMC in the alternate player list needs to be reworded. It's derogatory towards the Xbox modding scene, and the fact that is uses other open source programs like Mplayer to play back video and audio (don't remember the audio player off the top of my head) makes it almost irrelevant towards the list. --AndrewNeo 23:35, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

ADTS

ADTS redirects to this page, but there is no explanation in the article about ADTS. Can someone add this to the article? Daniel.Cardenas 20:45, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

iTunes and iPod Sections

I realize iTunes and the iPod have a special significance in the popularization of AAC. However a detailed product history (dates and versions of feature additions) seem more appropriate on the iTunes and iPod pages. Furthermore container issues (.m4b bookmarking and DRM, etc) probably shouldn't be discussed in great detail, instead brefily summarized .For instance is EMI deal that important to AAC, wouldn't it be better to say that the iTMS used to sell DRMed tracks only now sells DRMed and unDRMed tracks? The more detailed information seems to belong on the iTunes and iPod pages? --XanderJ —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 00:25, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Since no one has objected, I've applied said changes. --XanderJ 06:25, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

AAC-LD duplication

Advanced Audio Coding#AAC Low Delay and AAC-LD are nearly verbatim copies of each other, they should be merged in some form. —Preceding unsigned comment added by XanderJ (talk • contribs) 00:36, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Done. 130.101.100.104 13:04, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:MPEG-4 AAC.jpg

Image:MPEG-4 AAC.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images uploaded after 4 May, 2006, and lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot 09:15, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Something is too much,something is MISSING

Maybe what is here has some faults, I cannot argue on this, what is surely missing is the quotation of one or more softwares if there are, that can EDIT or SAVE recordings using these codecs (names and synonyms are not clear, but this can be due to not yet neatly affirmed evolutions), not merely "players" or "encoders" that can manage it. Thanks for the attention Tommaso AVERSA MateseBand@tim.it —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.13.172.67 (talk) 14:35, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Songbird

In the page is write that SongBird is based on iTunes. AFAIK is based on XULRunner (as stated on the SongBird pages). Is an error or a my lack of knowledge? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.238.11.105 (talk) 03:18, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

hd-aac

no mention of hd-aac? http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/EN/bf/amm/projects/lossless/index.jsp —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.170.166.206 (talk) 19:32, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. HD-AAC appears to be a registered trademark for a proprietary file format that supplements (interleaves?) an AAC stream with MPEG-4 SLS data. Apparently Fraunhofer IIS feels broadcasters are interested in having a single data stream that can be decoded as ordinary, lossy, low-complexity AAC, or as lossless AAC+SLS ("HD-AAC®"). The Extensions section at the end of the article already mentions MPEG-4 SLS, and we are trying to avoid promoting brand names, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to mention "HD-AAC" as an example of AAC+SLS. I've gone ahead and done that just now. —mjb (talk) 03:36, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

MPEG-4 vs AAC Confusion

The article says AAC uses a "Modern version of the Luhn mod N algorithm" Can someone verify this? It seems odd to me that they would choose an algorithm like that over, say, a CRC. I'm thinking that "modified version of Luhn mod N" is actually a fancy way of saying CRC (which is so terribly standard, I'd have expected them to use it), and the article should be more specific. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.46.245.232 (talk) 21:31, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

This article & the MPEG-4 article leave me very confused on what the actual relationship between AAC and MPEg-4 is! For example this article says:

"AAC is also the standard audio format for ... the MPEG-4 video standard."

While the MPEG 4 Article says:

"AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) was standardized as an adjunct to MPEG-2 (as Part 7) before MPEG-4 was issued."

Now what is a normal reader (like me) supposed to make of that? Is AAC a subset of the MPEG-4 standard? An example of the MPEG-4 standard? A model which was used to create the MPEG-4 standard? Is there such a thing as an independent MPEG-4 compression algorithm which isn't called AAC? The MPEG-4 article seems to imply that AAC was a separate standard that was pre MPEG-4. Any and all clarifications would be appreciated! LemonLion (talk) 13:03, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it would be nice to get some clarification about that. My understanding: AAC is the name of the audio encoding technology specified in the MPEG-2 Part 7 standard (which differs substantially from the audio encoding technology specified in the MPEG-2 Part 3 standard). AAC is also the name of some subset (or class of subsets) of the MPEG-4 Part 3 standard. Now comes the hard part. Are there any differences between MPEG-2 AAC and MPEG-4 AAC? If so, what are they? If not, then why bother to standardize the same thing twice?

There also seems to be several AAC variants — called low-complexity AAC, low-delay AAC, enhanced AAC plus, HE-AAC, HE-AAC v2, etc. The exact relationship between these things seems somewhat difficult to ascertain. How many incompatible variants of AAC are there? What distinguishes something that is AAC from something that is not AAC? Do AAC decoder capabilities have some kind of nested structure? -131.107.0.73 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 01:40, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

ADTS

ADTS redirects here, but it's not mentioned anywhere. Would someone care to explain what ADTS is? 83.78.52.179 (talk) 16:19, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

OK, I did some Googling and added a section at the bottom for AAC container formats. It still needs more info added, but it's a start. —mjb (talk) 23:29, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

AAC vs OGG Vorbis

May be a AAC vs Ogg Vorbis would make sense? also the comparison article (Comparison of audio codecs) seems to say little about performance.I'M not expert so I can not help directly. --BBird (talk) 13:47, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Keep in mind that original research is not permitted on Wikipedia. If someone has done an outside comparison of Ogg vs AAC, it may be appropriate to reference it. Weasel words regarding proprietary software are definitely not a good idea. --68.34.156.186 (talk) 17:10, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Autoarchived discussion "MPEG-4 vs AAC Confusion"

At least one prior discussion thread from this Talk page, on "MPEG-4 vs AAC Confusion", was moved to the Talk:Advanced Audio Coding/Archive 1 page without really getting resolved properly (IMHO). It would be nice to achieve some improved clarity on that topic. (Also, I noticed that there seems to be an auto-archive bot running, set to auto-archive all discussions here that are older than 45 days — that seems way too short to me, so I have increased the time period parameter that I found emedded at the beginning of this page from 45 days to 180 days.) —Pawnbroker (talk) 07:22, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

ACC and 2-channel surround sound

Does AAC compress to the extent that surround sound standards such as pro-logic and dts are not supported? --88.83.110.216 (talk) 17:47, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

AAC is way better than DTS and AC3, as it achieves transparency at 320-384 kbps. I dunno how much is required for transparency with the other 2 formats but I commonly see 640 and 1536 bitrates used for AC3 and DTS. Dunno what you mean by "not supported" but they dont compare to AAC in terms of quality if that's what you were asking.--70.65.229.62 (talk) 00:45, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

This clears things up a little bit. I thought DTS and AC3 were kind of standards which are used within other formats. However, does AAC support surround sound that can be sent over a stereo channel, as AC3 and DTS do by using different frequencies (is this right?). I'm wondering whether AAC is similar to DTS and AC3 in that it can send a surround signal to a surround system through a standard headphone-style connection. I'm guessing that even if it could, the surround receiver would not be able to decipher it.--88.83.110.216 (talk) 20:17, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

That I dont know, as I dont own a surround sound system nor do I encode 5.1 audio itself. AAC may have the flexibility limitations you described, which may explain why AC3 and DTS are standardized for 5.1 audio on DVDs and Blu-ray discs while AAC continues to be ignored. I gotta look this up...--70.65.229.62 (talk) 02:00, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

AAC’s improvements over MP3

Is it just me, or does the last paragraph under AAC's improvements over MP3 sound like an advertisement by licensors of the AAC codec? It contains phrases such as "[AAC] corrects many of the unfortunate design choices...", "...leave MP3 unable to compete", and "[MP3's] considerable flaws". There were design constraints involving the speed, memory, and cache of computers at the time the MP3 codec was developed; but design constraints are not flaws. Chris01720 (talk) 09:26, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Hey, I'm no expert, but how was a failure to evaluate various framesize decisions and settling with something unwise as a 576 maximum a "design constraint."? The audio suffers from flanging and ringing because of this limited leeway. The design was unfortunate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.65.229.62 (talk) 00:51, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

This paragraph is indeed loaded with unsupported qualitative statements, sounds like it was written by somebody with a vested interest (e.g. representative of Apple corporation). I would suggest editing accordingly. 78.53.230.209 (talk) 18:13, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

How are they unsupported? What needs to be editted? Maybe "leaves MP3 unable to compete" but I don't see how else this can be expressed. That sentence is addressing that AAC isn't a silver bullet in terms of superiority that would justify MP3 being completely marginalized, as bitrates higher than 128 are only minimally superior quality than MP3 at the same bitrate, but at lower bitrates, AACs superior design, better joint stereo leaves MP3 unable to compare. Notice how I used the word "compare" instead of "compete" and how it doesn't accurately represent the same message the paragraph was communicating if we used the word "compete." I don't think its biased at all. And btw I don't work for Apple, I'm an ordinary user who has switched to AAC less than a year ago on my own free will when I downloaded the free Nero encoder and witnessed the amazing quality.--70.65.229.62 (talk) 22:57, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Consider this... the article says that the MP3 format has fewer sample frequencies... AAC starts at 8kHz, MP3 starts at 16. So why then is it necessary to say AAC has "Much better handling of audio frequencies above 16kHz?" MP3 doesn't count signal data in the 8-16kHz range, so of course AAC is going to be better at handling it. Also, the paragraph that begins "Advanced Audio Coding is designed to be the successor..." looks like it's pasted in... The first paragraph is a reasonable and factual definition. The second tells you how to feel about AAC. There are demonstrable examples, obviously, of the design considerations which make AAC a more robust standard, so it should be able to stand alone on those, rather than be bolstered by debatable claims.76.127.149.13 (talk) 22:12, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, AAC 'is designed to be the successor to MP3. There's a good reason it has an MP4 extension and should've been called MP4 to make its status more obvious. Just like MPEG-4 was designed to be the successor to MPEG-2 and just like H.265 is being designed to be the successor to H.264, this is what AAC is.--Spectatorbot13 (talk) 07:01, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Cowon support

I've just checked the Cowon America forums as well as the instructions for one of my friends Cowon MP3 players and they don't appear to support AAC without using Rockbox. Thus I'm removing it from the article until a source can be found to show it. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 18:19, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

most popular usage

The most popular usage is definitely not itunes. Every nokia phone has its ringtones in aac format. This would be a much larger usage than itunes, although i'm not sure so i will only remove the itunes claim. Perryizgr8 (talk) 14:17, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

audio books

i downloaded a couple of books to a sd card and tried to play it on my Nintendo DSI, i found that i could not because it runs on AAC format. can i convert my audio into AAC format on the sd card?

lesa —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.104.67.122 (talk) 17:12, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

External Link

first one is broken --Trickstar (talk) 20:18, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Removed. Its doubtful it meets WP:EL anyhow. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 20:33, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Biased?

This article seems kinda biased like, "Oh my god AAC is amazing and the best quality ever and a million times better then MP3."

Just seems that way. Just sayin' —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.255.22.231 (talk) 08:09, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

So you have sensed the problem too! Yes, the problem exists but it is not exactly being biased. This article never even imply such a thing that you said; but it is obvious that at least one of the major contributors was a geek who was fascinated by the standard. This is easily visible from lack appropriate cohesion and consistency: Often, the article paragraphs are suddenly interrupted by detailed explanations of features of AAC. This is more evident in lead section and the beginning of the history section. This article needs copy-editing. Fleet Command (talk) 09:29, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

mp3 is a pretty crappy standard, there are far better audio-codex out there (without the patent issue). Markthemac (talk) 23:43, 23 January 2011 (UTC)