MP3 has practically become synonymous with online audio, as it is capable of transforming your music into small files, ideal for sharing. However, the fact of having a “reasonable” audio quality displeases many people, opening the market to other more robust formats, such as AAC (Advanced Audio Coding).
Unlike FLAC, AAC is a lossy audio compression scheme that focuses not on audiophiles, but on users who want high-quality music without sacrificing large disk space or even their portable music players to store them.
Seen by the market as a successor to MP3, this format has big names behind its development, such as Sony, AT&T, Nokia and Dolby Laboratories, and has even been standardized by renowned ISO and IEC institutes. Many of our devices already use AAC as standard, like PlayStation 3 and Portable, Nintendo Wii and DSi, Andoid devices, iPhones and iPod, being the standard format used even in iTunes.
To explain AAC’s superiority over MP3, let’s look at some points of comparison:
-AAC achieves a higher level of audio quality without increasing file size. This is measured in Kbps (Kilobits per second) and the higher this number, the more transparent the sound will be and the more space will be needed for the file. A song compressed in AAC at 96 Kbps has a clearer sound than an MP3 at 128 Kbps, which means more quality in a smaller size;
-A very important parameter to estimate the “purity” of a song is its sampling frequency, because the higher the margin, the more details are stored. While MP3 has a range of 16KHz to 48KHz, AAC ranges from 8KHz to 96KHz;
An MP3 audio file only supports 5.1 channels in MPEG-2, while AAC is capable of playing up to 48 different channels in MPEG-4;
-The above data only explains the preference of many users and companies to replace MP3, which has been standard since 1993. The only drawback seen by some manufacturers is the need to pay royalties to the Dolby Digital encoder (decoder) and AAC decoder. , but this is something that already happens with the MP3 format, so who knows with a little negotiation things will be resolved.
