Since I don't think it's been brought up for a while. I wanted to check if there is any new info on inplementing an AAC decoder in the near future? Has a desicion on the licensing been made? I am one who would be very interested in AAC.

The AAC encoder has already been written by ARM, but would cost empeg more to license im sure. Just out of curiosity, what encoder would you use if it was implemented?

Sean

From various forums I understand that pystel and liquid audio are the best encoders for AAC (with liquid being about the best). I haven't tried AAC yet but I am strongly considering switching to it because the quality/size is better than mp3. Any thoughts on this?

I have tested the psytel encoder in the past, it did a better job at 128 than lame did, but lame was still more efficient with its vbr mode. Psytel was sometimes inconsistent with its quality. It had trouble encoding live music, I could hear a lot of artifacts in a relatively easy to encode song. Ivan has had a hard time with aac since all the cool methods of compression have been covered by patent in the iso aac code. Im sure he has improved his encoder since I last tried it, i'll have to check his website and see what changed. I havent tried liquifer yet, I wouldnt even know where to get it anyway?

Sean

I am strongly considering switching to it because the quality/size is better than mp3

Hard drive storage space is so cheap now that quality/size should be very low on your list of priorities. If you're talking about storage on your PC, you can buy space for music storage at about 17 cents an hour. ($175 for a 60 GB drive, figure 17 hours per gigabyte at 128kbps.) The empeg with its notebook drives will of course be more expensive -- but still will cost less than 40 cents for each additional hour of storage capacity over the base unit.

About the only priority that means a lot any more is quality. If I had to choose a secondary priority, it would be ripping-encoding speed. I really can't think of much else that matters.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

The technology is available and Rio have negotiated licencing terms, however there isn't close to enough demand to warrant putting it into the car player yet.

Rob

What is the current state of affairs with AAC on the Empeg. I just saw one of the inventors of MP3 on TV the other day and he was ranting and raving about how much better AAC sounds then regular MP3. Isn't this the same format used on DVD's?

It might sound better than equivalent bitrate MP3, but probably no better than WMA or Ogg. I think it is now safe to say that the car player will never get AAC as Rio is not going to pay the licensing fee (per unit royalty) for a long discontinued product.

Rob

How much is this royalty, and could Empeg people pay for their own license if they wanted the feature?

I have a question about AAC.

Is there *ANY* product on the market, other than those sold by Apple, which can play AAC files?

Yes. The Panasonic SD-card based units are often actually ONLY AAC players - the PC software transcodes the MP3s to AAC. Also, I believe one of the iRiver-made players (Soul?) offered AAC.

Hugo

Okay, cool. I thought AAC was a mac-only format. I stand corrected.

FWIW, Freeware AA(C) Decoder.

AAC is the standard for MPEG-4 audio. Apple just happens to be an early user.

Apple just happens to be an early user

Dolby were pushing AAC hard when we were designing the car player. Not exactly early

Rob

The key word there was "user." Sure it's been around for years, but who was really doing anything with it before QuickTime 6?