If patent licensing is the issue, how about letting those who paid for AAC support use the Nero encoder? I'm actually fairly pissed that I paid for such a lacking FAAC-based encoder, but I'd be more than satisfied with it if I could drop Nero's encoder in its place and encode with that instead. Encoding with foobar2000, while technically viable, doesn't have MM's warm fuzzies.

[quote="sarcher"]Nothing's changed fellas. A commercially licensed product can't offer integrated AAC encoding/decoding without paying royalties. Nothing they can do without building that into the base price.[/quote]
I don't think that the support feature is asking for NeroAAC integration, rather simply to specify an external encoder and parameters. For that matter, it could be ANY free external encoder, with absolutely no integration aside from passing along encoding parameters and variables to whichever external encoder a user chooses. NeroAAC, simply being a good example of a very useful external encoder.

[quote="sarcher"]
For what it's worth, I've never seen a single test that showed AAC (regardless of encoder) to be "much more efficient" in quality/size than LAME MP3. Slightly superior in some samples, yes, but by and far it's not going to make a difference. Plus, the tagging standards are better for MP3 at present. I don't think this is worth the trouble at the moment, especially since MM is one of the few players on the market that can use Quicktime to play Fairplay DRM-ed files.[/quote]

I hope you're not serious. If so I'm sincerely and deeply embarrassed for you. AAC-LC, HEAAC-SBR and HEAAC-SBR-PS (HEAACv1/HEAACv2) are far superior in DRASTIC Ways. It's nearly like comparing The Cinepak, or perhaps early MPEG1 Video codecs with H.264. MP3 is outstandingly antiquated in so many ways, regardless of how popular it may remain or how evolved and fine tuned the best MP3 encoders are. This is especially true at low bitrates. A 32kbit HE-AACv2 using NeroAAC is comparable (or better) in subjective quality than a 128k mp3. An HE-AAC @ 48k is likewise comparable (or better than) the most optimized MP3 @ 192kb, while retaining such things as dolby and multi-channel encoding. XM Satellite radio, for example, broadcasts in 48k AAC. 96kbps-128kbps is used for theater quality 5.1/7.1 surround sound and is the standard for BluRay multi-channel/multi-track audio encoding. MP3 and AAC are very different audio encoding technologies. Yes, you can encode AAC at ultra high bitrates (256kbps) but unless you're cramming 64 channels of audio into that, it's a waste not even practical to do such a thing for archival quality encoding.

[quote="sarcher"]A commercially licensed product can't offer integrated AAC encoding/decoding without paying royalties. Nothing they can do without building that into the base price.[/quote]
Please read this thread from the begin. We are not talking here about "integrated" encoding/decoding. Calling some external command-line program which is not included within the installation doesn't require any licensing. It could be even some open source/public domain one, e.g. modified Vorbis encoder.

[quote="sarcher"]For what it's worth, I've never seen a single test that showed AAC (regardless of encoder) to be "much more efficient" in quality/size than LAME MP3... Plus, the tagging standards are better for MP3 at present.[/quote]
You are joking, right?

Support for external Encoders are in http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=1391

Nothing's changed fellas. A commercially licensed product can't offer integrated AAC encoding/decoding without paying royalties. Nothing they can do without building that into the base price.

For what it's worth, I've never seen a single test that showed AAC (regardless of encoder) to be "much more efficient" in quality/size than LAME MP3. Slightly superior in some samples, yes, but by and far it's not going to make a difference. Plus, the tagging standards are better for MP3 at present. I don't think this is worth the trouble at the moment, especially since MM is one of the few players on the market that can use Quicktime to play Fairplay DRM-ed files.

Agreed and supported!

I even opened another thread in this regard!

This was discussed in the NERO AAC forum but I just want to rekindle/reiterate this is an important feature that is not just related to NERO AAC.

The ability to specify an external encoder like you can using the Custom setting in Foobar2000 would be very very useful. The Quicktime (qtaacenc) and NERO AAC encoders have become much more popular in the past year as everyone is realizing AAC encoding is more efficient than MP3.

To conserve space in my iPhone, I transcode very high quality encodes (MP3 320kbit CBR, AAC 256kbit and higher VBR, etc) to lower bitrates yet still transparent as to conserve space. It effectively reduces my music library size from about 20GB on my PC to about 14GB on my iPhone. I could get much more efficient storage usage if I could transcode to AAC using the Quicktime encoder instead of LAME MP3.

[quote="Peke"]If I manage I think I can even find few emails with Tomislav that we talked.[/quote]
Me too ;) He really did the very important part of the MP3 history.

Yeah you are completely right, I remember the times when I was looking in dos CubicPlayer source. If I manage I think I can even find few emails with Tomislav that we talked. But regarding windows Winamp was first widely spread/usable player.

see http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/MPThree.htm

Re patent rights: That is why I never learned law, but programing lngs ;)

Isn't the MP3 license held by 3 different companies? Microsoft was once ordered to pay 1.5 billion to one of the rights holders although I believe that got thrown out on appeal: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/02/8910.ars

[quote="Peke"]Just for update, Winamp uses own libraries AAC+ to decode AAC, regarding MP3 Nullsoft is one of supporters of MP3 format back in '90s if I'm not wrong Winamp was only one that could decode MP3 at some point.[/quote]
Winamp is using AAC & aacPlus decoder from Coding Technologies, Inc. Regarding to MP3, back in '90s the Fraunhofer IIS player named WinPlay was first, much before Winamp, but it was horrible, it didn't have even a seek bar. In the begin Winamp's MP3 decoding was performed by the AMP decoding engine by Tomislav Uzelac, but soon after switched to an ISO decoder from the Fraunhofer.

However, if we are talking about licensing, I think that it doesn't matter which library is really used. You could write your own library to encode/decode AAC file, but you still need to pay license fee to MPEG organization, right?

Just for update, Winamp uses own libraries AAC+ to decode AAC, regarding MP3 Nullsoft is one of supporters of MP3 format back in '90s if I'm not wrong Winamp was only one that could decode MP3 at some point.

See http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/AAC_fees.cfm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

At the moment we are investigating possibility to use Windows 7 native codecs in decoding AAC.

Yeah, but the hands of MediaMonkey are tied, licensing requirements don't give them another option. So all that remains is an explanation.

Well, as I said, I don't care if MM could play AAC files or not, but it seems you missed my point. There are many potential, first-time users who are not interested about some explanations about licensing. They just could try MM and it would not play something which other programs could play without any problem for free. Guess which program they would choose in that case.

I know, but the point I made still remains the same, even if I got the encoder mixed up with decoder.