External vs ACM encoding preference

[phro]

After a bit of reading in the Audio Encoding forum it seems people tend to prefer using an external app for encoding the audio portion of their projects. I tend to prefer using ACM codecs from within VirtualDub just for simplicity's sake, but I can't help feeling I'm missing something. There must be some benifit or people wouldn't take the extra step. Maybe someone could fill me in?

[KpeX]

In general I think people prefer an external app for quality or format reasons - BeSweet, the transcoder of choice around here, uses a full floating point operation to ensure quality, and supports a wide range of input and output formats. For example, I don't think there's an ACM codec at the moment for AAC or vorbis, and those are two of the most popular audio formats currently.

Also using an external app doesn't necessarily mean an extra step is involved - I prefer to encode to MP4 or Matroska rather than AVI, and these require an external muxer, and thus an addtional step, anyways.

However, if your destination format is MP2 or MP3 audio, and using a high quality ACM codec such as Lame, I see no problem with ACM audio encoding. As you mentioned in these cases it does simplify the process significantly.

[unplugged]

ACM interface is only CBR (constant bitrate).
crap! :D

Waiting UCI...