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Encoding to AAC is still, even after all these years, not an easy process. Well, unless you have a Mac. Apple AAC is still the best quality encoder, but it's o

Encoding to AAC is still, even after all these years, not an easy process. Well, unless you have a Mac. Apple AAC is still the best quality encoder, but it's only available for macOS, and even then, the only UI officially supported by Apple is the "Music" app, so you're going to have to use a third-party command line or GUI wrapper. (XLD is good.) Outside of that, quality of the various alternatives has changed over the years, but the Fraunhofer encoder, which they say they are using, is a good choice, even through licensing problems mean that it isn't included in ffmpeg by default. Frustratingly, the default build does come with an encoder called "aac", which isn't Fraunhofer, and has very poor quality. So, you have to make your own custom build. Even then, the low-pass cutoff defaults to a weirdly low value, leaving the user to guess at, or consult ancient wikis, to try to divine a suitable value.[1] It's unfortunate that AAC remains the best (by which I mean, most-supported) choice for modern lossy audio, because making it is still a huge pain. [1]: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_AAC#Bandwidth https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_A...

madars 2y ago
Apple's great AAC encoder was (is?) also available as part of iTunes for Windows. One can extract the DDLs from the installer and use them with qaac to encode AACs. Apparently even works in Wine: https://www.andrews-corner.org/qaac.html https://www.andrews-corner.org/qaac.html ! OBS also picks up CoreAudio DLLs so streamers install iTunes for Windows to improve audio quality on their streams.
- imglorp 2y ago
  For archival purposes though, a proprietary codec on a proprietary app in a proprietary OS that could be gone in the next release is not a panacea. This demands a format that will be playable at highest quality in 50 or 100 years. Not an easy problem!
thenickdude 2y ago
You can also use the Apple AAC encoder using ffmpeg (on a Mac only), with the argument "-c:a aac_at". Handy as it allows you to use it for encoding the audio track of videos, in addition to its support for pure audio container formats: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC#aac_at https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC#aac_at
sandreas 2y ago
There is also fdkaac[1] AS a wrapper for libfdk-aac. Besides that there a several docker images including static builds of ffmpeg including the libfdk bindings. However, Am I the only one questioning a lossy codec suboptimal for archival purposes? Maybe the sheer amount of data is too mich for lossless... 1: https://github.com/nu774/fdkaac https://github.com/nu774/fdkaac
Sonic656 2y ago
Every encoding tool I've seen & use, All use Apple AAC in the QAAC wrapper. At ~160kbps VBR, It far better than Vorbis which needs 256kbps in some genres like Noise/Industrial and MP3 is just severely outdated needing V0 or 320kbps to be transparent. I use FHG AAC(winamp encoder) as a fail safe measure when Apple encoder chokes on something.

madars 2y ago

Apple's great AAC encoder was (is?) also available as part of iTunes for Windows. One can extract the DDLs from the installer and use them with qaac to encode AACs. Apparently even works in Wine: https://www.andrews-corner.org/qaac.html https://www.andrews-corner.org/qaac.html ! OBS also picks up CoreAudio DLLs so streamers install iTunes for Windows to improve audio quality on their streams.

imglorp 2y ago
For archival purposes though, a proprietary codec on a proprietary app in a proprietary OS that could be gone in the next release is not a panacea. This demands a format that will be playable at highest quality in 50 or 100 years. Not an easy problem!

thenickdude 2y ago

You can also use the Apple AAC encoder using ffmpeg (on a Mac only), with the argument "-c:a aac_at". Handy as it allows you to use it for encoding the audio track of videos, in addition to its support for pure audio container formats: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC#aac_at https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC#aac_at

sandreas 2y ago

There is also fdkaac[1] AS a wrapper for libfdk-aac. Besides that there a several docker images including static builds of ffmpeg including the libfdk bindings. However, Am I the only one questioning a lossy codec suboptimal for archival purposes? Maybe the sheer amount of data is too mich for lossless... 1: https://github.com/nu774/fdkaac https://github.com/nu774/fdkaac

Sonic656 2y ago

Every encoding tool I've seen & use, All use Apple AAC in the QAAC wrapper. At ~160kbps VBR, It far better than Vorbis which needs 256kbps in some genres like Noise/Industrial and MP3 is just severely outdated needing V0 or 320kbps to be transparent. I use FHG AAC(winamp encoder) as a fail safe measure when Apple encoder chokes on something.