qaac - a new command line AAC/ALAC encoder using QuickTime API [Archive] - Page 2

kotuwa

13th September 2014, 09:31

Well, for one, that it doesn't depend on a 10-year-old Nero 7 package that I just never been able to get working in Windows 7. :p
What!? :angry:
As I know last NeroAACEncoder is released in 2009.
And no need of a nero package... unlike QAAC, single EXE can be downloaded and no extra setup is needed in NeroAACEnc. Nero used to give that exe, but not anymore I think... But easily downloadable from many other websites...
QAAC would be better, but not fro the reasons you mentioned :D

tebasuna51

13th September 2014, 10:30

QAAC is better than NeroAacEnc at low bitrates (there are test until ~ 96 Kb/s for stereo), with more bitrate the difference can be negligible.

kotuwa

16th October 2014, 14:21

Did a QAAC encode using MeGUI. HE-AAC CVBR.
mediainfo shows this
Writing application : qaac 2.44, CoreAudioToolbox 7.9.8.3, AAC-HE Encoder, CVBR 40kbps, Quality 96
What us the Quality 96 part?
What are the other values of this quality?
I know that there is a --quality switch that has 0,1,2 values..
Is this related to it?... probably not...
any switch related to this quality?
:confused:

IgorC

22nd May 2015, 17:13

Reminder: Apple was a winner (highest audible quality) amongst AAC encoders according to blind tests. http://listening-tests.hydrogenaud.io/igorc/aac-96-a/index.htm

qaac 2.49

Changelog:
[qaac] release 2.49
posted 2 hours ago by nu 774
Fixed issues on MP4Source:
Fixed handling of Nero style chapters starting from non-zero timestamp (typically inserted by fb2k and old neroaacenc).
Fixed handling of reading MP4 files with multiple elst entries.

[qaac] release 2.48 (refalac 1.48)
posted 10 hours ago by nu 774
Fixed an issue on MP4Source: trailing samples were discarded under certain conditions.

[qaac] release 2.47 (refalac 1.47)
posted 58 minutes ago by nu 774
Large file (>= 4GB) output is now supported. Very long duration (beyond 32bit limit) is also supported, but the latter is not compatible with QuickTime 7.
On very large files, container optimization can take several minutes. You can disable it by --no-optimize.

[qaac] release 2.46 (refalac 1.46)
posted an hour ago by nu 774
Fixed an issue on DLL loading: when a DLL qaac tries to load depends on other missing DLLs, OS was showing a modal dialog which effectively stopped the process until it is closed.
Allow -A option for refalac to be compatible with qaac.

[qaac] release 2.45 (refalac 1.45)
posted 40 minutes ago by nu 774
Added qaac64.exe that works with iTunes 64bit (ver 12.1).
Switched to static C runtime linking. Now you don't need msvcr120.dll and msvcp120.dll anymore.
Minor bug fixes.

Asmodian

22nd May 2015, 21:08

:thanks:

Great to see qaac updated, it is an excellent tool and I use it regularly. :)

Brazil2

23rd May 2015, 10:02

Reminder: Apple was a winner (highest audible quality) amongst AAC encoders according to blind tests.
At 96 kbps.

foxyshadis

24th May 2015, 11:46

Reminder: Apple was a winner (highest audible quality) amongst AAC encoders according to blind tests. http://listening-tests.hydrogenaud.io/igorc/aac-96-a/index.htm

FDK is considered higher quality now. Still, Apple AAC is extremely close, no harm using it, especially at 128 and up.

manolito

24th May 2015, 12:07

FDK is considered higher quality now. Still, Apple AAC is extremely close, no harm using it, especially at 128 and up.

Can you back this up with some test results?

I am using libfdk-aac from within ffmpeg, it does sound pretty good, but VBR modes seem to be problematic.

Cheers
manolito

SeeMoreDigital

24th May 2015, 14:58

FDK is considered higher quality now. Still, Apple AAC is extremely close, no harm using it, especially at 128 and up.I wonder if LoRd_MuldeR has thought about incorporating this (Fraunhofer FDK) 'open source' version of the AAC encoder into his LameXP audio encoding application?

LoRd_MuldeR

24th May 2015, 15:55

I wonder if LoRd_MuldeR has thought about incorporating this (Fraunhofer FDK) 'open source' version of the AAC encoder into his LameXP audio encoding application?
See here:
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1721930#post1721930

;)

SeeMoreDigital

24th May 2015, 16:21

Thanks

IgorC

24th May 2015, 19:29

FDK is considered higher quality now. Still, Apple AAC is extremely close, no harm using it, especially at 128 and up.
Hehe. That's simply not the case.

Fraunhofer developer (on hydrogenaudio board) has said that their FhG AAC encoder from Winamp still provides better quality than FDK.
Some personal tests also indicates the same.
So it's still Apple > FhG Winamp > FDK.

manolito

24th May 2015, 21:05

Thanks for setting this straight...

Cheers
manolito

stax76

6th August 2015, 19:31

In StaxRip currently only wav and flac are defined as possible input formats, are there any other formats supported?

hello_hello

7th August 2015, 05:11

Fraunhofer developer (on hydrogenaudio board) has said that their FhG AAC encoder from Winamp still provides better quality than FDK.
Some personal tests also indicates the same.
So it's still Apple > FhG Winamp > FDK.

I can't say I've compared them as I tend to use bitrates (or VBR quality settings) that are transparent enough for me not to be able to tell the difference, and I use QAAC for encoding "soundtrack" audio mainly due to it having the --no-delay option, but I'll say one thing for FhG/Winamp, it's very fast. VBR encoding is probbly around twice the speed of the other encoders.

My main dislike when it comes to FDKAAC is the huge bitrate difference between the VBR quality settings, especially the higher -m 4 and -m 5 quality settings. -m 4 seems a bit low while -m 5 is too high. Although I found the gap can be closed somewhat by specifying a low pass filter in the command line. I settled on -w 18500 for both as it increases the low pass frequency for -m 4 and lowers it for -m 5 and seems to produce more sensible bitrates.
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_AAC#Bandwidth

LigH

20th September 2015, 10:38

There are new dummies for the icudt55.dll (https://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=85135&view=findpost&p=907418) as addition to makeportable for qaac.

tebasuna51

2nd October 2016, 11:11

WARNING with last qaac 2.60 version:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1782018#post1782018

sneaker_ger

2nd October 2016, 16:46

tebasuna5, which 7.1 configuration would you recommend for e.g. BluRay rips? The new one from qaac >=2.61 or the old one from <=2.59?

tebasuna51

3rd October 2016, 03:05

For 5.1 all seems work fine.

I never use 7.1, my audio system is only 5.1 and can't test with a real player the differences but I don't like the patch applied.
For 7.1 use qaac 2.59 and always output as .m4a, never like .aac (without --adts parameter).

chros

20th January 2018, 19:41

I wanted to transcode my 320kbps cbr mp3 radio captured files into something meaningful today, so I found qaac with the default preset (-V91 -q2). So I searched for a small but powerful GUI for it, hence I found BatchEncoder (https://github.com/wieslawsoltes/BatchEncoder) on GitHub yesterday: it reminds me MeGui and BeHappy, but can do batch processing with threading, supports loads of codecs and presets, it can download the only used latest utils (x32 or x64 version). Previously I've been written small batch scripts for this type of audio transcoding: no more :)

Do I have to install AppleApplicationSupport64 to be able to use qaac? Isn't the CoreAudioToolbox.dll file enough itself?
That's what I did: downloaded iTunes x64 and extracted AppleApplicationSupport and AppleApplicationSupport64 with 7zip, then installed x64 version.

There are new dummies for the icudt55.dll (https://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=85135&view=findpost&p=907418) as addition to makeportable for qaac.
What's this file for?

For 7.1 use qaac 2.59 and always output as .m4a, never like .aac (without --adts parameter).
Why is that?
I've been wondering which output "container" to use for stereo music files, but since most of the players support raw aac streams, I don't care about tagging and mp3directcut (http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html) only supports raw aac streams I don't see why m4a is better. Am I missing something?

LigH

20th January 2018, 19:51

Do I have to install AppleApplicationSupport64 to be able to use qaac? Isn't the CoreAudioToolbox.dll file enough itself?
That's what I did: downloaded iTunes x64 and extracted AppleApplicationSupport and AppleApplicationSupport64 with 7zip, then installed x64.

No. If you executed the "makeportable" batch file, it would extract all the required DLL's for you into subdirectories (QTFiles + QTFiles64) which only need to exist with qaac.exe or qaac64.exe in the same directory.

32 bit:

qaac.exe
QTFiles\*.*

64 bit:

qaac64.exe
QTFiles64\*.*

What's this file for?

The "makeportable" batch file extracted all the DLL's from the iTunes64 installer which belong to iTunes' whole feature set; qaac needs only the encoder core. For encoding only, most of the content in the icudt55.dll is not required. But the file icudt55.dll can't be deleted, the encoder would refuse to work if it is not present. But you can replace the original files of several MB size with the tiny dummy DLL's, and the encoder still works.

Why is that?

M4A is a subset of the MP4 container which contains useful information about the structure of the AAC audio in its header, which a "raw" AAC audio stream with only ADTS headers partially lacks of. Most of all, the ADTS header is not able to store the channel layout of audio with more than 5.1 channels.

chros

20th January 2018, 22:04

No. If you executed the "makeportable" batch file, it would extract all the required DLL's for you into subdirectories (QTFiles + QTFiles64) which only need to exist with qaac.exe or qaac64.exe in the same directory.

Thanks LigH for the detailed instructions! Although it still took me 10 minutes to find where the script is: this post (https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,85135.msg878848.html#msg878848). :)

For encoding only, most of the content in the icudt55.dll is not required. But the file icudt55.dll can't be deleted, the encoder would refuse to work if it is not present. But you can replace the original files of several MB size with the tiny dummy DLL's, and the encoder still works.
It worked liked a charm, thanks!

M4A is a subset of the MP4 container which contains useful information about the structure of the AAC audio in its header, which a "raw" AAC audio stream with only ADTS headers partially lacks of. Most of all, the ADTS header is not able to store the channel layout of audio with more than 5.1 channels.
Thanks, OK, then I'll use m4a container.

LigH

21st January 2018, 15:29

Although it still took me 10 minutes to find where the script is...

Or the qaac download (cabinet) page (https://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/cabinet). Or MeGUI\tools\qaac.

chros

29th January 2018, 16:47

Or the qaac download (cabinet) page (https://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/cabinet).
Yes, that's where I found it in the end, thanks.
And I just noticed that the above mentioned BatchEncoder has a thread (https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=174242) here on doom9. :)

Bigjackaal48

12th September 2023, 10:33

I must be the few where --Quality 1 helps a few samples since I use "192kbps VBR, -q 1". Oddly even found Damaged & Destroyed by Emil Beaulieau needs --quality 0 to stop ringing/clicks?.

Barough

24th September 2023, 09:42

QAAC v2.80
https://github.com/nu774/qaac/releases/tag/v2.80

kentafilo

28th December 2023, 18:10

Hello everyone.
I would need your opinion regarding an audio encoding.
In your opinion, starting from a DTS Master Audio file, if I wanted to transcode it, would I get a better quality file with qaac encoding at vbr 127 kbit/s or with AC3 at CBR 192 kbit/s?
In other words, is it better to encode an audio file with qaac or with AC3?
Thank you.

SeeMoreDigital

28th December 2023, 18:22

Hello everyone.
I would need your opinion regarding an audio encoding.
In your opinion, starting from a DTS Master Audio file, if I wanted to transcode it, would I get a better quality file with qaac encoding at vbr 127 kbit/s or with AC3 at CBR 192 kbit/s?
I think you mean 're-encode' not "transcode"... Also, is your DTS-HD MA source stereo or multi-channel?

kentafilo

28th December 2023, 18:54

Yes exactly, I meant "re-encode"
The source file is a DTS -HD MA stereo

SeeMoreDigital

28th December 2023, 20:04

Yes exactly, I meant "re-encode"
The source file is a DTS -HD MA stereoPersonally, I would re-encode any 'lossless' stereo source to flac.

But much will depend on your given audio playback device(s). Is there any particular reason why you want to encode 'lossless' audio to 'lossy' audio?

kentafilo

28th December 2023, 20:23

"I have carried out a personal project and re-encoded the DTS-HD MA audio into an MP4 using the qaac encoder (version 2.80). An acquaintance criticized my choice, stating that in such cases, it is better to re-encode in AC3 and that the audio quality of AC3 (192 kbps) is superior to that of AAC (qaac VBR 127 kbps). I would like to point out that the original audio file, even though in DTS-HD, is of poor quality. Given this, is it true that AC3 is better than AAC?"

https://i.postimg.cc/pdwLq9CS/Screenshot-2023-12-28-201827.png

microchip8

28th December 2023, 21:13

No. AC3 is not better than AAC, especially at lower bitrates

SeeMoreDigital

28th December 2023, 21:19

2-channel 'lossy' Dolby Digital is not as good (efficient) as lossy LC-AAC or HE-AAC. However it is useful if you are bit-streaming such audio to an external decoder amplifier!

But like I said earlier... Is there any particular reason why you want to encode 'lossless' audio to 'lossy' audio? What playback device(s) are you using?

tebasuna51

29th December 2023, 15:17

Of course if the sound track have good quality (not only lossless but high frequencies without noise) recode stereo DTS-MA to flac can save space with the same quality.

But if the sound track is from a old movie most the times a lossy encode is enough, I recommend use qaac -V 90 or 100 much better than AC3 192 CBR.
A make a test over the movie "Daddy Long Legs", even with many music included, and I obtain:

VBR min./avg./max. : 6 / 118 / 383 Kb/s (for -V 90)
VBR min./avg./max. : 6 / 132 / 406 Kb/s (for -V 100)

Like you can see when qaac need more quality use high bitrates much better than 192 CBR, but with silences and dialogs don't need so much and the bitrate average is less than 192 CBR

Using CVBR -v 128 I obtain VBR min./avg./max. : 6 / 115 / 376 Kb/s
I recommend TVBR -V instead -v CVBR because we don't know the bitrate needed, it is better, for me, fix the quality.