freeform goodness

• AAC Quality
  The following page (which I must have missed before) makes me feel a little bit more secure about buying songs from the iTunes Music Store (and encoding to .m4a from iTunes.) Apparently Quicktime’s encoder is quite highly regarded. I’ve been encoding my AAC files at 160 kbps, but some reading suggests even this might be overkill. Traditionally, I’ve encoded audio to MP3 with LAME’s --preset-standard, which works out to be a variable bitrate MP3 in the neighborhood of 192kbps to 224kbps for most material. I’ve been very satisfied with the quality I get from that setup, but it has 2 problems — it’s very slow (at least 3 or 4 times slower than an AAC encoding on the same hardware) and the file sizes are considerably larger (an issue when I’m trying to fit an album on a USB keychain or rsync it to the office over my piddly cable modem upstream.)
• Some other links I found:
  • Dolby’s AAC Homepage and official AAC licensing page.
  • A nicely info-stuffed AAC wiki.
  • Hydrogen Audio’s AAC Forum.
• McDonalds and Apple to offer 1 billion free songs? Yes? No? Maybe? It seems almost inevitable that some sort of sponsorship/patronage business model is going to evolve to fill the vacuum left by the implosion of the traditional record industry.

:: Dave Walker 11:53 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

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