traveler wrote:
"Does anyone have experience with AAC? I hear it is indistinguishable from CD quality, and supports multiple tracks. Winamp offers a plug-in and I understand I can play them within Media Jukebox if I have real audio. Unfortunately, there are no plug-in yet for portable players. Nor do I understand the tagging support within AAC.
So at the end of the day, I want it all. I want portable, great sounding music. I don't mind having two formats, I just don't want a bunch of them."
Well, most of the lossy encoders (MP3, MPC, OGG, AAC) are effectively "transparent" to most people most of the time. A lot can depend on the quality of the equipment you are using, what level of quality you use to encode and whether or not you have what the people over at HA call "golden ears". For example, if you are listening on a portable player with $20.00 headphones on the bus, pretty much all of those encoders will sound fine. The general consensus, over HA anyway, is that MPC is the best sounding at bitrates above 160, AAC for bitrates around 150 or 160, IIRC, and OGG/MP3 would be the choice for lower bitrates.
By the way, not sure what you mean by "supports multiple tracks".
You can pretty much use any of the Winamp 2.x input plugins in by putting a copy of them in the MJ plugins folder. You don't need Real Audio to make this work. You can get all of the plugins here:
http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/Actually, I think there are a couple of portables that support AAC, but in a limited way. I remember reading that one would play AAC as long as the bitrate wasn't over 160. I don't remember specifically what brands they are, but you can probably do a search at the HA forums and find the threads.
Technically, there is not a tagging specification officially supported for AAC. There are, however, a couple of programs that will put ID3 tags on them, but it is not really recommended...especially ID3v2. You can find one of them here:
http://www.audiocoding.com/If portability is your main concern, then MP3 is probably the best option, as it is the only format with widespread hardware support. AAC has one or two players that support it, but don't quote me on that. OGG may have support eventually, especially since they released the version 1.0 this week. It is doubtful that MPC will have hardware support anytime soon. Also, Kenwood just officially added support for FLAC (one of the lossless encoders) to their Music Keg car audio system.
The only reason you might need to use more than one format is if maybe you used one of the lossless encoders (Monkey's, FLAC, LPAC, etc) for listening at home (if you have the hard drive space) and then transcoded to MP3 as needed for your portable. Monkey's would be ideal for this because it is very easy to convert an APE file to another format using the Monkey's Audio software. You might also be able to get away with transcoding from a high bitrate MPC to a lower bitrate MP3 without noticing a big quality loss on a portable, but as a rule, transcoding from one lossy format to another is not recommended.
JohnH wrote:
"What is the fastest encoder that still provides a good quality mp3?"
If you are going to use MP3 the only encoder to use is LAME. On my PIII 733, it encodes at about 3.5x real-time. If you are open to other formats (MPC, OGG), those encoders are faster. For me, MPC encodes at around 5x real-time. I haven't tried the newest OGG release yet, but I recall reading that it was encoding at about the same speeds as MPC.