HE-AAC (AAC+) in Android

[fightingirish]

Anyone else here using AAC+ audio files on their phones?

I'm not talking about Pandora and various webcasters streaming in the format (have had good results with it), but encoding music in the format.

For those of you wondering, AAC+ is a newer format that enables very high quality at very low bitrates. I decided to do a little experimenting. I encoded some files in the format (64K HE-AACv2), for phone playback. I figured I'd try to conserve SD card storage (currently, most of my music files are encoded at 192K standard AAC (using a M4A container), which sounds better than MP3 at that bitrate -- again, I have a lot of music and space is a concern). So, I started playing the AAC+ files using Poweramp. Stuttered more often, drove CPU usage through the roof! Completely froze up the phone. I noticed I did have the EQ on. Played back with no problems on stock music player, and seemed a bit better on Poweramp with EQ off.

Anyone else have any experience with this file format? Any suggestions? Should I change the container format from AAC to MP4?

Currently Froyo on LG Optimus, BTW.

 

[kejlyCZ]

Have you tried Vorbis ogg format? I encode my music to this and the size is about half of mp3 at same bitrate. The most important, it's free format and natively supported by Android.

 

[fightingirish]

The last time I played around with ogg was many, many years ago (around the time it came out). I was turned off by it at the time because it made the music sound very weird. I'm sure things have changed since. Guess it was time to put it to the test again.

I decided to do my own testing. I encoded some files (I've been using Steely Dan for benchmarking, since they are one of those rare bands that are sticklers for sound quality). I made a few ogg files of "Hey Nineteen" (at 80, 128 and 160K), and compared it to an m4a (AAC) file at 160K. I could definitely hear the difference between the two 160s. Ogg gave a fuller sound than m4a. The lower bitrate ogg files I encoded aren't bad, but I can hear a difference. They sound decent, but not great. Kinda like good FM radio. But 160K works best for me in regard to ogg and AAC.

I was initially playing around with the HE-AAC (AAC+) files because I wanted to get somewhat decent quality in as small a size as possible. That format will do it. But it was choking up my phone (or at least when I listened through Poweramp with the EQ on). So that, unfortunately, was a dealbreaker. A shame, since I like the HE-AAC format, particularly on streaming audio (Pandora, I Heart Radio and many stations use it). Nice to hear decent audio quality at a bitrate low enough to stream over a 3G connection without getting choppy.

I know there's a lot of people here who hate AAC and AAC+, mostly due to the proprietary nature of it, and are adamant about mp3 (which itself is proprietary). I archive my music on the computer in mp3, around 320K or 256K (I just don't have the space for FLAC, and mp3 is a pretty universal format). But for the phone, where space is even more of an issue, AAC seems to do the job better at lower bitrates and file sizes. Now, I seem to be sold on ogg.

And yes, I know that converting mp3 to other formats is a big no-no, but I just don't have the space for 320K mp3 files on my phone (I've got a ton of tunes to cram onto a 16GB card) and it still sounds acceptable to me. So there.

FYI, I used the fre:ac program to do the conversion. It uses the aoTuV encoder, which is highly rated. And best of all, it's free!