[M4IF Technotes] Suggest some MPEG 4 Encoders

[Jay W. McGuire]

On 6/18/02 12:24 PM, "Ben Waggoner" <ben   interframemedia.com> wrote:
> Apple's QuickTime 6 Public Preview includes pretty good Simple, Advanced
> Simple (without B-frames), and AAC codecs.

I'm an audiophile and am planning to buy Apple's new Xserve w/480GB of file
space to store all of my CD audio files. Can anyone tell me if there's any
advantage, besides reclaiming additional storage space, to going with AAC
over WAV files? I'm interested in the best possible sound quality and have
been using Monkey's Audio (lossless) on the PC but, so far, there is no
support for APE files on the Mac. I listen to music constantly and am also
concerned about what kind of stress that puts on a computer. Since AAC files
would be much smaller than WAVs or APEs, will they result in less stress
(thru less frequent/smaller reads?) on my hard drives?
I'm playing around with QuickTime 6 right now and have made a couple of AAC
files. I'm a bit confused as to what kind of settings I should be using,
though. Like I said, I want the best possible sound quality, so does that
mean I should be encoding at 256kbits/second (the highest QT6 will go)?
Also, do I want to select any of the streaming options? I'd be accessing the
Xserve's AAC files from one or more Macs located around the house, but
that's not streaming, right? And what about the setting for 'ISMA'
compatibility? Do I want/need that if I'm not streaming? And what about
"tags?" Any attempts I make to enter "Artist," "Album," "Full Name,"
"Copyright," "Track," etc., result in only the "Copyright" information being
kept after the file is saved. Is this a limitation of the "Public Preview"
for QuickTime 6? Or are these things not supported in an AAC file?
Who's code is being used by QT6? I think I read somewhere that it was from
Dolby? Is this true? Is any one implementation better than another? I hear a
lot of talk about a "Psytel" encoder on the PC. Is its AAC encoding any
better or worse than QT6's AAC? I tried to play the Psytel demos on the
author's site with QT6...all I got was silence. Are there compatibility
problems when going from one encoder to another?
I used LAME at its highest 320k setting to create MP3s before I decided to
store uncompressed WAVs and/or use the lossless Monkey's Audio compressor
for best possible sound quality. Will I be happy with the quality of AAC? Is
it really as good as they say?  Or should I stick with WAVs or wait until
someone comes up with a Monkey's Audio decoder/player for the Mac?
Sorry for all the questions! I'm a real newbie on this AAC stuff!
Regards,
Jay