SwingDJs

I've been hearing from a lot of apple heads lately that aac is a better format for compressing wav files than mp3, that you get better quality with aac then you do with mp3 byte for byte, anyone know what are the pros and cons to each format?

AAC does give you better quality, but I'll trade off space for being free of DRM. Any format that tries to limit how I can use music that I have purchased is something I will never use.

There's also something to be said for a format that *everything* supports, versus a format that has huge limitations.

If you must have better quality than MP3 (and we've discussed the hell out of how to get MP3 to sound good: VBR High), then try one of the developing open standards like ogg. More and more things are supporting it.

Sorry but what is DRM? I'll look up OGG because I know absolutely nothing about it...

Digital Rights Management - gives them control over how many times you can play a song, if you can burn it to CD, if you can transfer the song to another device, if it gets deleted if you unsubscribe from a service, etc. Big brother stuff.

LindyChef wrote:I'll trade off space for being free of DRM. Any format that tries to limit how I can use music that I have purchased is something I will never use.

*cough* hymn *cough*

Jesse

Are DRM also an issue for songs you rip or is it only applicable when you buy from the itunes music store?

Currently DRM is not an issue for songs you rip from CD, but you can bet that the entertainment industry is very interested in making sure that the only circumstances you can make a copy of a song are the ones they control. DVD-A and SACD have copy protection schemes and there have been attempts to make CDs unreadable in computer CD-ROM drives. But if you're ripping right now to MP3 or OGG you're fine.

And Jesse, interesting little link

CafeSavoy wrote:Are DRM also an issue for songs you rip or is it only applicable when you buy from the itunes music store?

You can't edit songs from the itunes store without changing them to wave (or MP3) first. That sucks so i don't use aac.

It seems pointless to me not to use the superior AAC format for encoding your own collection simply for ideological reasons -- in what possible way will you be compromised in the future by using AAC for this purpose now? I've been using AAC (128k) to encode my stuff for a while now, and I'm glad I did. I get much cleaner encoding and it takes less disk space. DRM doesn't come into the equation at all.

Zot wrote:It seems pointless to me not to use the superior AAC format for encoding your own collection simply for ideological reasons -- in what possible way will you be compromised in the future by using AAC for this purpose now?

1) From a listener's perspective Ogg is just as good, if not better, than AAC. Higher bitrate MP3s also offer just as good quality, in return for a tradeoff in disk space (which is very cheap now anyways).

2) By using AAC I am supporting, indirectly, a format which has the possiblity of restricting how I use my data. The path DRM walks down is one where information in society is controlled and restricted and considerations like fair use or other reasonable propositions are thrown aside in favor of copyright holder paranoia.

If I've got a good alternative, which I do, then I'll use it.

I looked at the Hymn site. Very impressive. However I'd like to have software to strip the DRM off my Napster2.0 downloads. Does that software exist? I would LOVE to not have to burn to CD before reripping to MP3.

Ok, it's getting quite obvious that MP3 is getting old and is “beginning” to be replaced.

Can we focus in on AAC vs OGG!

Can you fill us in using the following Headings?

Sound Quality,
Available compatible software (DJing, editing),
Available compatible hardware (iPod, iRiver ect)
Direction of industry,
Ease of transferring to other file formats,
File size,
Any additional features (Tags etc,)

Thanks
Brian

i'm still a fan of vbr mp3 with winlame...

Yakov wrote:i'm still a fan of vbr mp3 with winlame...

Preach it brotha!