AAC audio formats

AAC audio formats

When we talk about the different audio formats that we have available for our work or entertainment, we usually hear that there is the MP3 format, Dolby type sound, and in some cases it has audio in the AAC format.

This last audio format is very characteristic of some movies found on DVD discs, which comes to be a technical specification that means Advanced Audio Coding, or translated into Spanish “advanced audio coding”, and which actually comes to be an extremely important resource for those editors who work in the video area.

Working with the AAC audio format represents having a better sound quality than many of the cases is distributed to different speakers, perfectly defined in terms of the position they should occupy in an appropriate environment; In addition, this AAC audio format tends to occupy a smaller space than an MP3 audio format would occupy, which in the design of a DVD disc comes to be known as Layer 3 type audio, which is widely used in the compilation of audio and video for the formation of a DVD movie. But the important thing is that this AAC format provides high-fidelity audio quality and that many times it is used for the well-known “no-home” formats.

It is there where the conveniences of using this AAC audio format are found, since by occupying 30% less space than an MP3 audio file, having better quality and fidelity in its sound, it is widely used not only by those film editors DVD, but also by iTunes as well as by many music discs they represent today.

AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is a digital audio signal computer format based on a lossy compression algorithm, a process by which some of the audio data is removed in order to obtain the highest possible degree of compression, resulting in an output file that sounds as close to the original as possible.

features

AAC uses a variable bit rate VBR, an encoding method that adapts the number of bits used per second to encode audio data, depending on the complexity of the audio stream at any given time. AAC is an encoding algorithm Broadband audio that has superior performance than MP3, produces better quality on small files and requires less system resources to encode and decode. This codec is oriented to broadband uses and is based on the elimination of redundancies of the acoustic signal, as well as on compression by means of the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), very similar to that of MP3.

Advantage

Superior audio quality for the same bitrate (kbps) your Radio at 32kbps will sound like 128kbps in mp3. Stereo sound support from 16 kbps unlike MP3 that supports it from 40 kbps. Support on Blackberry, Iphone, Smartphone equipment. Members of the codec family aacPlus aacPlus v1 is the combination of AAC and SBR, as the high-efficiency standardization profile in MPEG-4 (HE AAC). aacPlus v2 builds on the strong success story of aacPlus v1 and adds value in all fields where increased compression efficiency of stereo signals is mission critical. aacPlus v2 is a true superset of aacPlus v1, aacPlus v1 is from AAC. With the addition of Parametric Stereo in MPEG, aacPlus v2 is the current state of the art low-bit-rate open standard audio codec. Not compatible with MPEG-1. Sample Rate: 96 KHz, 88.2 KHz, 48 KHz, 44.1 KHz, 24 KHz, 22.05 KHz, 16 KHz. Maximum quality between 320 and 448 kbps (5 channels) and between 128 and 192 (2 channels) Maximum supported bitrate: From 12 kbps (in HE-AACv2 profile) to 448 kbps (in AAC-LC profile)

Three options

Highest quality (resolution at 23.43 Hz and 2.6 ms) Non prediction Scalable sampling rates

Three types of profiles:

AAC-LC: 16 KBps to 448 KBps HE-AAC: 16 KBps to 128 KBps HE-AACv2: 12 KBps to 56 KBps (most efficient profile in audio quality)

Differences Aac plus vs MP3

When deciding which compression format to choose to take full advantage of own resources such as those of the listener in streaming broadcasts, one of these two alternatives is generally considered.

mp3 vs aac

MP3 or MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3:

It is a standard compressed digital audio format with loss, the loss of information from the mp3 format is not audible by the human ear, therefore we will not distinguish the difference between an uncompressed audio file and an mp3 file.

In addition an mp3 file manages to reduce the size of the sound file without influencing its quality, approximately 1 minute of audio in mp3 format occupies 1 MB with a quality almost equal to the quality of Cd.

These advantages have achieved that the mp3 format can be played in almost all audio players, which is the format par excellence for the exchange through the internet, one of the best options at this time to store music with good quality, and also The audio format that is most used in portable players is a standard and therefore compatibility with all media is guaranteed.

The mp3 audio format allows you to select the quality of the audio that we are going to compress, the quality of cd would be equivalent to 128 Kbps (Bit rate), but we can select the compression between 8 Kbps and 320 Kbps taking into account that the higher the transmission of data (Kbps), the greater the use of broadband resources for both the broadcast and the reception by the listener.

AACplus: MP4 / aacPlus (HE-AAC) Enconder v 1.31; Stereo
As in the mp3, in the aacplus there is a solution for the little width for the channels. This is what is known as “Parametric Stereo” and corresponds to what is known as HE-AAC v2. Unlike what happens in the case of mp3, it is not convenient to use this option in high bitrates, in this case over 48kbps.

Considerations:

Quality assessments are expressed in percentages, with 100% being the overall quality of the original file.
The valuations are merely estimates but are intended to faithfully reflect the differences in quality between the different formats to the different bitrates.
The best alternatives for each format have been marked with red, according to the relationship of quality and consumption of own resources when emitting and resources of the listeners to correctly receive the audio.
Conclusions:

The first and most important regarding the mp3 is that, even in its highest quality, it is already obsolete. In any bitrate it is surpassed by the others so it will always be preferable to perform compression to any other of the subsequent formats. Ogg Vorbis and mpc are better quality formats that far exceed the mp3 but we have not included because they are not widely used. There are also several other formats that offer better compression.
For the mp3 the best bitrate is at 128kbps or 192 kbps, with a minimal difference in quality. Above that the difference is imperceptible and inferior to it is widely discernible.
At 72/74% the AAC PLUS format beats its competitors widely in the 48 / 64kbps being the best choice in the range. It will depend on the original file, as well as the greater or lesser preponderance of the high, medium and low. The decrease in fidelity is easily noticeable but it is not too much and many people will have no problem accepting it.
Under 128kbps, the quality of the mp3 drops considerably, while in the AAC PLUS format the decrease is not as pronounced. In the latter, it can be seen that between 128 and 48kbps the decrease in quality is minimal, with a difference of only 7%. Therefore, it is not worth compressing at 128kbps or at 96kbps having the option of doing so at 48 or 64 with a minimal difference in quality.

Advantages of AAC with respect to MP3

The AAC format supports multichannel sound which is an appropriate audio codec for the surround sound of 6 or more speakers, although it is currently not the most supported codec for it. However, MP3 only allows, in its base format, stereo sound.
It can reach a sampling frequency of 96khz, used in recording studios. MP3 is designed for playback only and to reach up to 48khz.
The sound quality is considerably superior to the same birate. This means that it is possible to encode an audio file in AAC with a bitrate lower than the equivalent in MP3 while maintaining the same sound quality. An audio file in HE-AAC encoded at 48kbps can offer a quality similar to an MP3 encoded at 128kbps.
Even at very low bitrates (32kbps or less) the sound suffers little loss compared to MP3. This could be