Sound format of the future?

[vkem]

Who does know what's the best sound format to encode music, that they will play good in future? I'd like to encode them so, that they need as little space as possible. That's the reason MP3 isn't a solution, because when it's old technology achieving a "transparent" sound quality with LAME needs a comparable high bit rate.

AAC seems promising, because big companies like Nokia and Apple invest to it, Nokia with mobile phone support and Apple with its new net music service and AAC's sound quality is the best of these all as it has been tested. Vorbis has also high sound quality, but if Kiss DVD players aren't counted, the hardware support is missing because they don't have as much bucks as big companies. WMA is Microsoft's proprietary product, when it's sound quality is high and with money they have bought support to many CD and MP3 players, I wouldn't bet to a closed format like that.

It's unlikely that MP3 will be used for a lot time, so what's the new sound format which'll beat it?

[Teegedeck]

AAC. Very versatile codec, covering the mid to high bitrate ranges with LC-profile and the low ranges with HE AAC. And I think there's still some tuning to be expected that might bring it ahead of MPC (=musepack, not Media Player Classic...).

If you don't care much about hardware-support, use MPC. It scored better than all the other codecs in listening-tests at 128 and 160 kbps.

Edit: At 160 kbps almost all of the codecs will be transparent, at 128 kbps your best bet is MPC.

[Sirber]

Is Vorbis @128kbps (Q4) "transparent"?

[Fr4nz]

There isn't ANY codec transparent at ~128kbit/sec. Anyway MPC was the best at that bitrate, followed by AAC and Vorbis.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=11936

Regarding the codec of the future...well there will be a lot of choice. There is an heavy development on AAC, maybe with the time it will be THE standard but...who knows! MPC and OGG have a very big potential.