Our Digital Music » AAC

ABCs of Digital Music – AAC

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:06:34 +0000

For many years, MP3 has been the standard for audio storage on computers, some CD players, and MP3 players galore. When iTunes hit the mass market (basically when it hit iTunes 4 and branched to Windows), the Advanced Audio Codec (AAC) made its presence known by having it be the default codec in iTunes. And there’s good reason that Apple has set it as the default codec.

AAC files are notorious for being the same quality as a higher encoded MP3 file, not to mention a smaller file size. While an average 3 minute song in 256k MP3 format is about 5.6MB, a 128k AAC file of the same song has nearly the same quality and only weighs in at about 2.8MB. File sizes generally vary depending on how much “action” is in the song.

While AAC formats are beneficial to iPod users, you may run into problems with other and older non-Apple MP3 players. The AAC codec is has started to break through most of the players, but for those who have yet to upgrade to an iPod-compatible head unit in their car (I’m guilty) and use MP3 files on their CDs, you may not be able to play AAC songs, thus making you convert the songs to MP3 format. While it’s not hard to do (for most songs), it is a tedious process.

Just a word of warning before you do go encoding your entire MP3 library to AAC, note that re-encoding a song does take some of the quality away, so you might be best just sticking with whatever format that you may currently have.

Post from: Our Digital Music

ABCs of Digital Music

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:06:08 +0000

A new series we’re going to be starting here on Our Digital Music is “The ABCs of Digital Music” where, if you didn’t guess, we’ll go through digital music terms that starts with every letter of the alphabet. Think of it as a crash course, or Cliff’s Notes, or a cheat sheet if you dare… There is a plan lined out, but if you would like to see something additional covered here, please feel free to comment below and tell us what you think! Post from: Our Digital Music

Post from: Our Digital Music

MP3: Kick it to the curb?

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:47:33 +0000

On another b5media site (and my previous home), High Def Delight, Christopher Swenson wrote an article essentially saying that it is time to ditch MP3. MP3 is quite the ancient file format (approved in 1991) yet it is the prominent file format in the digital music market as almost all digital music players are referred to as MP3 players because, well, they all play MP3 players. While I agree with the post that we should start to transfer to other codecs like AAC, I believe MP3 is here to stay for quite some time.

MP3 files are dominant, as I mentioned, and if you asked people what AAC files and Ogg Vorbis files are, your average Joe will most likely not know what the difference then. AAC files are definitely more “efficient” with the sound quality to file size ratio, but if you convert your MP3 files to AAC, you lose more data because all you are doing is just re-encoding that file again and losing the data.

I won’t say too much else as his article is definitely worth a read, but I don’t really think MP3 is going anywhere anytime soon. MP3 is a format that has stood the test of time and has a firm footprint in the ground.

Read [High Def Delight]

Image Source: Zach Flauaus

Post from: Our Digital Music