aacPlus anyone?

[mythdraug]

What are the chances that qmp will natively or find a generous plugin author to support aacPlus?

[acozz]

Looks like it costs money to license...

[Rex_Mundi_Incarnit]

Most internet radio websites also support *.pls so i dont see the problem. Also what Acozz said, it will cost money because it isnt free. I know WMP supports it.

Looks like Acozz silently hit the 1,000 post mark ;)

[Toe]

A lot of people seem to misunderstand what AAC-Plus is. AAC+ (http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/wiki/?page=aacPlus) is a marketing department's name for what is more appropirately called HE-AAC (http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/wiki/?page=HE+AAC). HE-AAC, or High Efficiency AAC, is the name used in the actual AAC standard. LC-AAC + SBR (http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/wiki/?page=SBR) (spectral band replication) = HE-AAC. (LC-AAC is Low Complexity AAC, which is what most encoders/decoders support. The full main AAC profile is generally seen as adding a lot more implementation complexity, with relatively little gain in quality.)

A lot of people also see the name AAC-Plus and think, "OMG, the plus means BETTAR!!!" Well, yes, to a certain extent. HE-AAC absolutely OWNS (http://www.rjamorim.com/test/64test/results.html) at streaming bitrates. (64kbps and below (http://www.rjamorim.com/test/32kbps/results.html)) But the thing is, it's largely useless (http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/wiki/?page=SBR) from about 96kbps and up. If you're trying to encode your collection at 192kbps HE-AAC, you've largely missed the point of HE-AAC.

On the player side, things aren't as scary as you might think. As I said above, HE-AAC = LC-AAC + SBR. If the decoder doesn't support SBR, it plays it back as regular LC-AAC, at roughly the same quality as if it had been encoded to LC-AAC in the first place. (In theory, at least. I've heard of at least one decoder that chokes on HE-AAC.) As for playback support in QCD, I'm actually not entirely sure where this stands. Shaohao's MP4 plugin is based on FAAD, as are the AAC/MP4 plugins of most players. However, I'm not sure exactly how old the version in that plugin is. I think HE-AAC support was introduced in FAAD2. But AFAIK our MP4 plugin doesn't support streaming, so if you're looking to play AAC streams from Shoutcast & such, you're probably out of luck for now.

As for encoding HE-AAC within QCD, it should be possible to do this today. You would need Nero Ultra's MP4 encoder (http://ww2.nero.com/enu/Nero_6_Ultra_Editon_Update_Audio.html), which supports HE-AAC, a CLI frontend for Nero's encoder such as Nencode (http://rarewares.org/aac.html), and the generic CLI encoder (http://www.quinnware.com/list_plugins.php?plugin=82) plugin for QCD.