AAC streaming?

Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 2:21 am Post subject:

Haha! He's talking about the sources of course. Re-ripping the original CD's to a lossless format (WMA) for streaming to a lossy one (mp3pro, ogg, aacplus, etc). Transcoding from one lossy source to another would just sound terribly bad. Confused

I guess I better put my money where my mouth is. I think I recall mentioning at one point that I would probably become a permanent contributer here if the quality ever improved, and I see that it has. Kudos for finally getting AACplus up and running. I was here only a few days ago actually and didn't see AACplus as an option at that time. Then I went to HydrogenAudio today to see what was new since I hadn't been there for quite a while as well. I came across the following which is why I came over here and logged in just now:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=44105

I was hoping this might help the AACplus movement along a little bit, but it's obvious it doesn't need any more involvement from my end hehe. Now to listen in more often and enjoy. It's sounding quite good so far I have to say, much better than that mp3Pro ever did IMHO. Again, you have my gratitude. Cool

Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 6:06 am Post subject:

Regarding 48k, that's too bad to hear. But at least the audio quality is noticeably better over mp3pro, clearly a dead end format (which AAC is partially based on I think). Using 48k AACplus successfully really depends on the musical style, at least based on my experience from listening to the various stations out there. Pop music, for example, isn't too bad. Same with techno style stuff. Classical and movie music seems to suffer the worst though when it comes to audible compression artifacts with lossy codecs. At least the WMA lossless files, and I truly do appreciate the amount of work involved in this (I have a rather large collection I'm about to convert too) shouldn't take up too much hard drive space since orchestral music tends to compress the best out of all the musical styles. Who knows, maybe the AAC codec in the SAM software will improve with some fine tuning over time as well. Just look at LAME and Vorbis. There is always room for improvement, especially with a new codec.