Advanced audio coding
Advanced Audio Coding(AAC) is a lossy data compression scheme intended for audio streams. AAC was designed to replace MP3. AAC, IS/IEC 13818-7, is an extension of the MPEG-2 international standard, IS/IEC 13818-3. It was further improved in MPEG-4, MPEG-4 Version 2 and
MPEG-4 Version 3, IS/IEC 14496-3.
Some of its advances:
As anyone who has used several different MP3 encoders will tell you, each encoder performs diffrently and they produce output of sometimes wildly varying quality. AAC, on the other hand, takes a modular approach to encoding. Depending on the complexity of the bitstream to be encoded, the desired performance and the acceptable output, implementers may create profiles to define which of a specfic set of tools they want use for a particular application. The standard offers three default profiles:
In April 2003, Apple Computer brought mainstream attention to AAC by announcing that its iPod and iTunes products would support songs in AAC format, and that customers could download popular songs in this format via the iTunes Music Store. While this helps ACC, it only further splinters a market overcrowded with formats, leaving many people and companies confused over the which format(s) to embrace. However, ACC requires a license for the patents involved, so the free and of similar quality Ogg Vorbis format may still win the day.
What this all means to the listener is better and more stable quality than MP3 at equivalent or slightly lower bitrates.
Depending on the ACC profile and the mp3 encoder, 96 kbit/s AAC can give nearly the same or better perceptional quality as 128 kbit/s MP3.
