Nero Releases FREE Reference Quality MPEG-4 Audio Command Line Encoder

[dimzon]

New Version (1.0.0.2) is out, get it from
Any quality-related changes in encoder?

[Ivan Dimkovic]

Yes, there were some small quality fixes, too.

[bond]

writes mpeg-4 tags? i assume those are not the apple-style tags? what specs are defining those tags?

[Ivan Dimkovic]

We do write Nero Digital-style tags, defined by the Nero Digital Audio specification.

In addition, compatibility tags are written, too - so other tagging systems will see the tags as well.

[bond]

We do write Nero Digital-style tags, defined by the Nero Digital Audio specification.in what way do they differ from apple's tags?

[Ivan Dimkovic]

They differ in a way that they enabled ND-Audio specific features (CD index maps, replay gain, chapter-specific album art, etc...)

It is of course understood that you have the freedom to use whatever tagging specification you wish - but at least I will make sure that Nero tags are catering to most wishes of the audio communities.

[bond]

interesting. can they be seen as an extension to the apple tags (in the sense that basic tags, like "name" or so, are identical in nero and apple. storage in the udta atom...) or are they different?

[fanbanlo]

C:\ffmpeg>ffmpeg -i INPUT.wma -acodec pcm_s16le | xxxxxxx ....

Shure ffmpeg provides also a waveheader at beginning when serving the data to stdout?

I tried adding -f wav like this:

C:\ffmpeg>ffmpeg -i INPUT.wma -acodec pcm_s16le -f wav - | neroaacenc_sse2 -q 0.
28 -ignorelength -if - -of output.mp4

FFmpeg version CVS, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
configuration: --enable-theora --enable-mp3lame --enable-libogg --enable-vorb
is --enable-faad --enable-faac --enable-xvid --enable-x264 --enable-mingw32 --en
able-a52 --enable-dts --enable-pp --enable-gpl --enable-memalign-hack --enable-a
mr_nb --enable-amr_wb
libavutil version: 49.0.0
libavcodec version: 51.1.0
libavformat version: 50.0.0
built on Jan 29 2006 03:34:22, gcc: 4.0.2
Input #0, asf, from 'INPUT.wma':
*************************************************************
* *
* Nero Digital Audio Reference MPEG-4 & 3GPP Audio Encoder *
* Copyright (C) 2006 Nero AG *
Duration: 00:41:10.4, start: 0.608000, bitrate: 20 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Audio: wmav2, 22050 Hz, mono, 20 kb/s
Output #0, wav, to 'pipe:':
Stream #0.0: Audio: pcm_s16le, 22050 Hz, mono, 352 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
* All Rights Reserved Worldwide *
* *
* Package build date: May 1 2006 *
* *
* See -help for a complete list of available parameters. *
* *
*************************************************************
ERROR: could not parse WAV file
size= 106376kB time=2470.0 bitrate= 352.8kbits/s
video:0kB audio:106376kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.000040%


Problem with piping? 'cause I tried:
> ffmpeg -i input.wma -f wav temp
> neroaacenc_sse2 -q 0.28 -ignorelength -if temp -of output.mp4

and it works... Nero's problem or XP's piping problem?

update: tested with 1.0.0.2, same result.

Thank you.

[Avish]

New Version (1.0.0.2) is out, get it from:

http://www.nero.com/nerodigital/eng/down-ndaudio.phpHow one could use the provided decoder? Is it usable to general users?

[fanbanlo]

How one could use the provided decoder? Is it usable to general users?
yes, read End-User License Agreement for details.

[Avish]

yes, read End-User License Agreement for details.Since when "How to use" details are being written in EULA?:p

I think I didn't put my question in proper way. What I meant was Is the decoder usable for general ppl like me who have no clue how to use these EXEs, simple usage like using it to decode AACs through some player? Or is it only for Devs who use it in their programs by calling through intarnal scripts? Programs like meGUI or BeHappy. ;)

Thanks.

[fanbanlo]

Since when "How to use" details are being written in EULA?:p

I think I didn't put my question in proper way. What I meant was Is the decoder usable for general ppl like me who have no clue how to use these EXEs, simple usage like using it to decode AACs through some player? Or is it only for Devs who use it in their programs by calling through intarnal scripts? Programs like meGUI or BeHappy. ;)

Thanks.
it is very easy to use.
almost every CD ripper can use this.
it just takes in a .wav file and convert into a .mp4 with aac codec.

Read this thread!

[Avish]

it is very easy to use.
almost every CD ripper can use this.
it just takes in a .wav file and convert into a .mp4 with aac codec.

Read this thread!I'm asking about the decoder exe, not the encoder exe. :)

[fanbanlo]

I'm asking about the decoder exe, not the encoder exe. :)
that's for AAC (mp4) -> PCM (.wav), is this what u want?
> neroaacdec -help

*************************************************************
* *
* Nero Digital Audio Reference MPEG-4 & 3GPP Audio Decoder *
* Copyright (C) 2006 Nero AG *
* All Rights Reserved Worldwide *
* *
* Package build date: May 26 2006 *
* *
* See -help for a complete list of available parameters. *
* *
*************************************************************
Usage: neroaacdec -if <input file> -of <output file> [-chapter <number>]

So you can enter:

neroaacdec -if input.mp4 -of output.wav

in your Command Prompt.

[Avish]

that's for AAC (mp4) -> PCM (.wav), is this what u want?
> neroaacdec -help

*************************************************************
* *
* Nero Digital Audio Reference MPEG-4 & 3GPP Audio Decoder *
* Copyright (C) 2006 Nero AG *
* All Rights Reserved Worldwide *
* *
* Package build date: May 26 2006 *
* *
* See -help for a complete list of available parameters. *
* *
*************************************************************
Usage: neroaacdec -if <input file> -of <output file> [-chapter <number>]

So you can enter:

neroaacdec -if input.mp4 -of output.wav

in your Command Prompt.

Yes. That's the answer I was looking for. What is the exact use of that decoder exe. Its not what I thought. ;)

Thank You. :)

[obieobieobie]

I'm having problems with -2pass and -br


C:\>neroAacEnc_SSE2.exe -br 30 -2pass -if "Star Wars Theme.wav" -of test2
*************************************************************
* *
* Nero Digital Audio Reference MPEG-4 & 3GPP Audio Encoder *
* Copyright (C) 2006 Nero AG *
* All Rights Reserved Worldwide *
* *
* Package build date: May 26 2006 *
* *
* See -help for a complete list of available parameters. *
* *
*************************************************************

ERROR: no valid SBR configuration found

C:\>

I can't see what I'm doing wrong.

[fakey]

obieobieobie, please read the readme.txt.

You are trying to encode at 30bps.

[obieobieobie]

oh holy crap, how could I have missed that. Thank you, fakey. :)

edit: ooh that's very nice. At 31 kbps, AAC + SBR + PS sounds a whole lot better than vorbis aoTuV b4b at q=-2 (which is approx. the same bitrate)

stellar encoder, ivan and nero digital :)

[stucky]

Would it be terrible of me to want 2 pass encoding AND a quality based bitrate target?

[GodofaGap]

?

You can either do a quality based encode, and then you don't know the resulting bitrate, or you can do a 2-pass encode with a target bitrate.

A 2-pass quality based encode doesn't make sense, and I'm not sure what you mean with a "quality based bitrate target".

[stucky]

Please correct me if I'm wrong:

1 The basic idea behind Npass encoding is that you get a higher quality encoding for the same number of bits used.

2 Quality based encoding allows me to trust the encoder to use the number of bits required to achieve a certain quality of encoding, but not more bits than required.

As a human, I don't know how many bits a specific track is going to require, but I do know is that I want the smallest possible file that sounds the best it possibily can.

[Oline 61]

1-pass quality tries to reach a certain quality. It analyzes each sample and determines how many bits it needs to reach the specified quality.

2-pass bitrate tries to reach a certain bitrate. The first pass analyzes each sample and weights it comparatively to the other samples in the stream. Then, the bitrate curve produced in pass 1 is scaled to reach an average bitrate, and then encoded in the second pass.

Multipass encoding only gives you a higher quality per bit when you are trying to reach a bitrate target.

Bottom line: If you are trying to reach a specified bitrate, use 2-pass bitrate based encoding, if you have no bitrate target use 1-pass quality based encoding. Since quality doesn't have a set size quota, using 2-pass is redundant and unessecary.

[stucky]

That makes sense.

[ReinerSchweinlin]

Thanx a lot to Ivan and Nero for releasing this very fine peace of software.
After using foobar with this new encoder, I decided to convert some of my MP3s to play on my ipod and came across the limitations of the apple-device. As far as I understand right now, advanced Features like SBR oder "-he" are not supported by the plattform apple uses (portableplayer, I assume?).
Am i right that forcing LC-Mode with "-lc" would give compatible Files for playing on ipod? Can someone please confirm, as I can´t find any detailed tech-info on what is supported by Apple.

[bond]

he-aac is backwards compatible, meaning every lc-aac device can play he-aac files

and afaik apple doesnt support he-aac explicitely (which doesnt mean the files wont play)

[DeathTheSheep]

HE may be backwards compatible for sure, but the high spectrum will be cut off (only 22khz will be played if the device doesn't explicitly support HE-AAC).

[junglemike]

Hi, I'm sorry if this was asked. Couldn't find it. I've experimented little bit with free nero encoder and Foobar2000. I have some questoins. Sorry if this is too obvious I read faq and neroaacenc.exe -help and couldn't find the answers.

Q1) I notices that for some low bitrates nero downmixes to mono automatically. What is bitrate treshold that it starts to happen?

Q2)Can i force it be stereo? even for very low bitrates?

Q3) How can I force it be mono? (no such option in -help file)

Q4)What settings would be good for compressing audio books?

Q5) I compare latest Ogg with q -2 on 22khz/mono files (audio books) - which gives me ~20kbps and nero encoder. In general, i see that for regular music (44khz) at very low bitrates <64 - nero is better than ogg, but for 22khz/mono files nero sound much worse , Why?

[DeathTheSheep]

Q1 and Q2) Check your decoder. In my experience, Nero defaults to stereo, even at the lowest of bitrates. However, some decoders cannot recognize the stereo elements of low-bitrate streams due to the fact that these decoders don't support PS (Parametric Stereo).

Q4) Depending on your decoder, preference, etc, I'd suggest as low as Quality 0.1 with standard settings. Sometimes lower.

Q5) Try forcing LC profile. To do this, check the -help.

[Kurtnoise]

Q3) How can I force it be mono? (no such option in -help file)
For the moment, we can't...

Q5) Try forcing LC profile.
huh ? Considering question 5 asked by Junglemike, that makes no sense...Could you develop a little bit more ?

[InfoCynic]

I'm having terrible trouble with this program randomly hanging my machine. I've tried using it directly (after using azid to create a 6ch wav) or with Belight (from source 6ch AC3) with replacement bsn. Sometimes I can get through an entire encode (45 min file, about 15-20 minutes at HE q = .3), sometimes not. Various files (from a season of a TV show), so not all the same file.

Other CPU-intesive tasks like XviD encoding don't hang the system.

I have an Athlon XP 2500+ @ 3200+ and 2 GB of RAM.

[Sharktooth]

try removing the overclock and see if it helps.

[elmimmo]

They differ in a way that they enabled ND-Audio specific features (CD index maps, replay gain, chapter-specific album art, etc...)

Ivan, could you do a step by step on how it should be done to go from a CD to MP4 with CD index maps and chapter-specific album art?

Please, excuse me if this was explained elsewhere. I found nothing.

[DeathTheSheep]

Q5) Try forcing LC profile.
huh ? Considering question 5 asked by Junglemike, that makes no sense...Could you develop a little bit more ?
Ah ya. Maybe for some reason Nero's doing your 22khz file in HE-AAC, which is bound to sound just terrible. Forcing LC profile will keep the encoder clean. ...eh, just a try-and-see suggestion, haven't actually tested this myself.

:o

[Kurtnoise]

Well...If an encoder uses automatically a lowpass or a resampling, it's for a good reason imo. Why not let the encoder to choose by himself the appropriate settings ? Today, most of the encoders are well tuned.

Also, keep in mind that this is a lossy compressor.

[rootkit]

What is this?

[~/Documenti/Film2iPOD]$ file audiodump.wav
audiodump.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, stereo 44100 Hz
[~/Documenti/Film2iPOD]$ neroaacenc -lc -q 0.15 -if audiodump.wav -of test.mp4
ERROR: could not parse WAV file
*************************************************************
* *
* Nero Digital Audio Reference MPEG-4 & 3GPP Audio Encoder *
* Copyright (C) 2006 Nero AG *
* All Rights Reserved Worldwide *
* *
* Package build date: May 26 2006 *
* *
* See -help for a complete list of available parameters. *
* *
*************************************************************

[Kurtnoise]

Why you didn't run trough wine ?

[otherdarom]

that was under wine...
wo. wine u get this:
"run-detectors: unable to find an interpreter for ./neroAacEnc.exe"

it seems that neroenc doesnt work under wine...

[Sharktooth]

sadly it doesnt.

[Kurtnoise]

it seems that neroenc doesnt work under wine...

sadly it doesnt.

Too bad for you...:p

http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/7523/winendjg5.png

Works fine here...Anyway, if you're looking for a HE-AAC encoder which works without wine, have a look at Helix Producer or 3GPP reference encoder.

[otherdarom]

Too bad for you...:p

http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/7523/winendjg5.png

Works fine here...Anyway, if you're looking for a HE-AAC encoder which works without wine, have a look at Helix Producer or 3GPP reference encoder.

Now i understand. The error was not to set the filenames in "quotation marks".

It works for me that way:
wine neroAacEnc.exe -q 0.15 -if "/usr/share/sounds/startup.wav" -of "/tmp/startup.mp4"

But not that:
wine neroAacEnc.exe -q 0.15 -if /usr/share/sounds/startup.wav -of /tmp/startup.mp4

Maybe NeroEnc tries to read the file as given /.../...wav and not as sum of path and filename.

I still wait for avisynth and neroenc as native versions for linux.
Any idea when that happen ?

Thanks for hints go to
Kurtnoise13

[Kurtnoise]

I still wait for avisynth and neroenc as native versions for linux.
Any idea when that happen ?
Avisynth 3.0 (i.e Linux port) is available but not usable yet. For NeroEnc, nobody knows...except Nero devs. :)

[Sharktooth]

Too bad for you...:p

http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/7523/winendjg5.png

Works fine here...Anyway, if you're looking for a HE-AAC encoder which works without wine, have a look at Helix Producer or 3GPP reference encoder.
You're right. And you helped me discoverying (by making me investigate on the problem) the "wine" static link was pointing to a quite old and badly configured version of wine.
Now everything works as it should. Thanks again ;)

[miztadux]

Hello,
I posted a question about AAC encoder delay, with some results of encoding/decoding tests.
The goal is to know if, in order to keep perfect sync in the playback, we got to compensate for this delay when encoding a movie soundtrack with AAC.
Surprisingly the Nero CLI encoder/decoder combo didn't introduce any sizable delay, that's one of the reason I link this question here...

I'd appreciate if people used to encode soudtracks in AAC would comment:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=902856#post902856

Kudos to the Nero team for providing a free high quality aac encoder.
Thanks.

[Boardlord]

New version (1.0.7.0) released today!

Changes:

neroAacEnc.exe:
- Quality tuning for some bitrates
- Added support for 16 and 22.05 kHz samplerates for HE AAC
- Fixed HE AAC configuration problems for 5.1 files (at q=0.0)
- Temporary file handling fixed on Windows Vista
- Various speed optimisations

neroAacDec.exe:
- Small speedups
- Reduced memory usage

neroAacTag.exe
- No changes

[Vytenis]

And wouldn't be interesting to see and compare vs. new aacplus_enc.exe
Recently Coding Technologies claims significant advance in new version:
The new encoder enhancements also lead to significantly improved speech quality and multi-channel audio fidelity at even lower bit rates. For example, delivering 5.1 Surround Sound now only requires 128 kbps, previous versions required 160 kbps. aacPlus is capable of delivering CD quality stereo at 48 kbps. In comparison, CD quality for MP3 is typically rated at 128 kbps.

[shon3i]

will be very interesting especilay 5.1 test, coz ct in earlier versions haved far better multichannel than other aac encoders IMO.

Both CT and Nero encoders are updated, new test will be wellcome.

[[)370|\|470!2]

No multiprocessor support, am i right?

[Kurtnoise]

You're right...

[Kurtnoise]

Not yet official but a new release is on the way soon...

changelog 2007-07-20 - Version 1.1.34.0

- neroAacEnc:
- Linux version
- New q value mappings
- Retuning of almost all bitrates
- Fix in HEv2 encoder/decoder delay
- Fixed incorrect streamlength written in MP4 files
- Significant speedup
- Removed -hinttrack option

neroAacDec:
- Linux version
- Fixed a memory leak

neroAacTag:
- Added -hinttrack option


No more wine tool...yeaaah. :)

http://www.listening-tests.info/mf-64-1/NeroDigitalAudio.zip

[menno]

Unless some serious bug comes up, this is the package we will release on the Nero website.