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AAC was indeed developed primarily by Fraunhofer IIS, which also developed MP3. Apple definitely was one of the earliest adopters with their iPod line, though,
by lxgr 2y ago
AAC was indeed developed primarily by Fraunhofer IIS, which also developed MP3.
Apple definitely was one of the earliest adopters with their iPod line, though, and arguably helped make it mainstream.
I do appreciate that they picked an industry standard (patent-encumbered, though) instead of coming up with their own secret sauce, though. Not sure they'd still do the same today.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoEverything was patent encumbered to some extent, it was just a question of how you read the patents. I worked at AT&T Labs in the early days (they were also some of the inventors) and I remember being invited to Sony Music studios in Japan around 1999/2000, where the head of their studio business let us do a “dance off” between AAC and the proprietary Sony ATRAC3 codec at similar bitrates. Using AAC was a pretty obvious win vs. most of the alternatives out there around the time iTunes launched.
- ksec 2y agoAAC-LC has been patent free for at least 6 years already if not longer. Unfortunately the best AAC-LC encoder is from Apple and it is not open source. But everyone can still freely use it though.