« Sunny day - not snowday. | Main | The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - The Movie! »

Tuesday, 22 February 2005

AACPlus (Techie)

My old friend Jon mentioned HE-AAC* in an email to me, and all it sounds rather impressive.

It could well be the 'next' MP3, as far as high quality compressed audio is concerned, as - from what I understand - you can get great-sounding audio through a dial-up connection.

There are a few internet radio stations - such as Radio Paradise making use of the system, and I'd love to do an Image FM broadcast in AAC+ format at some point.

Unfortunately, though, the only products available that can stream HE-AAC (otherwise known as AAC+ or AAC Plus, which is the CodingTechnologies brand name) are commercial and quite expensive. I was toying with Helix Producer, which has recently included capabilities, but it's really rather complicated (and command-line driven) and, after two hours of hacking around with only a one line error message as a clue to what I was doing wrong, I gave up...

So for now, the players are available (winamp v5.07 and later supports it), and encoders (Nero has just introduced it, and the versatile dbPowerAmp can do it, too) but it'll be a bit of a wait until someone with much more time and talent than I do can create a cheapo streaming engine for everyone to use!

Link of the day

• www.tuner2.com : A directory of AAC+ radio stations. Wow - they sound amazing!

*(link found at www.drunkenblog.com)

Posted by james at February 22, 2005 11:24 PM

Comments

Posted by: jon von bird at February 26, 2005 5:55 PM

Post a comment