p2pnet.net News:- There’s more to life than Apple’s AAC so last year, Roberto Amorim devised tests for both free and commercial AAC encoders ” to find what encoder performs best encoding AAC at 128kbps CBR”.

The project raised a lot of interest, so much so that Amorim staged a second test to compare the AAC winner QuickTime against other popular compression formats.

In the line-up were:

• LAME encoder 3.96 -V5 –athaa-sensitivity 1
• Apple iTunes 4.2 128kbps AAC
• Ogg Vorbis aoTuV tuning b2 -q 4.35
• Musepack 1.14b –quality 4.15 –xlevel
• Sony Atrac3132kbps
• Microsoft WMA9 Std Bitrate VBR 128kbps

“After 11 days of collecting results Roberto Amorim today announced the results of his 2nd Multi-Format listening test: Vorbis fork AoTuV scored the highest and ranks as the winner together with open source contender Musepack closely followed by Apple’s AAC implementation and LAME MP3, which improved markably since last year thanks to further tunings of its VBR model done by Gabriel Bouvigne,” writes technology is sexy in /. here, going on:

“Sony’s ATRAC3 format ranks last after WMA on the third place. The suprising success of AoTuV (compared to last year’s performance of Xiph.org’s reference implementation) shows the potential of Vorbis and possible room for further tuning and improvments. Take a look at the detailed results and their discussion at Hydrogenaudio.org.”

Were the results what Amorim, who’s studying computer science at Brazil’s Curitiba (where he lives) University expected?

“Some points surprised me immensely,” he told p2pnet, “Particularly:

• Ogg Vorbis performing so well after the independent tunings implemented by Aoyumi
• iTunes AAC performing so badly, close to the outdated MP3.
• Atrac3 performing to terribly.

“I wasn’t amazed at WMA – I had already seen several reports from users complaining about bad quality and a ‘metallic sound’. I also wasn’t amazed at MPC, because it had already performed very well at the former 128kbps test I conduced.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2004 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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