__NOTOC__ Nero AAC Codec is a set of software tools for encoding and decoding

Advanced Audio Coding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate. AAC has been stan ...

(AAC) format audio, and editing

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related t ...

metadata. It was developed and distributed by Nero AG, and is available at no cost for Windows and Linux for non-commercial use. The codec was originally part of

Nero Digital Nero Digital is a brand name applied to a suite of MPEG-4-compatible video and audio compression codecs developed by Nero AG of Germany and Ateme of France. The audio codecs are integrated into the ''Nero Digital Audio+'' audio encoding tool for ...

, but was later released as a stand-alone package. Nero's AAC encoder has been very competitive when tested against other encoders in scientific listening tests, for a time, second only to Apple's AAC encoder. In 2006, Chip Magazine (Germany) found that AAC files encoded with the Nero AAC encoder would consume as little as half of the space on a portable music player when compared to MP3 files of similar audio quality.

Components and Capabilities

The current package is labeled version "1.5.1.0", but contains the following three utilities: The encoder and decoder support MPEG-4 AAC LC, HE-AAC (AAC LC + SBR), and HE-AACv2 (LC + SBR + PS) Audio Object Types.

Sample rate In signal processing, sampling is the reduction of a continuous-time signal to a discrete-time signal. A common example is the conversion of a sound wave to a sequence of "samples". A sample is a value of the signal at a point in time and/or spa ...

s up to 96 kHz, and multichannel audio up to six channels (5.1 surround) are supported. The metadata utility can read and write Nero Digital,

iTunes iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mu ...

, and

Memory Stick The Memory Stick is a removable flash memory card format, originally launched by Sony in late 1998. In addition to the original Memory Stick, this family includes the Memory Stick PRO, a revision that allows greater maximum storage capacity an ...

format tags to MPEG-4 containers. These command-line tools are commonly used by

shell script A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file man ...

s and programs like ABCDE,

Exact Audio Copy Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is a CD ripping program for Microsoft Windows. The program has been developed by Andre Wiethoff since 1998. Wiethoff's motivation for creating the program was that other such software only performed jitter correction whil ...

and

foobar2000 foobar2000 (often abbreviated as fb2k or f2k) is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Stan ...

to convert audio to AAC.

History

The codec was originally part of Nero Digital, a complete

Audio/Video solution. The ASP/ AVC (video) codec was developed by a French company called

Ateme Ateme S.A. is a multinational company that specializes in video delivery, namely software for video compression based on H.265 / HEVC standards; MPEG4; MPEG2 encoding / decoding solutions for contribution links, multi-screen live streaming, OT ...

. Nero built an in-house team to develop the AAC (audio) codec that included Ivan Dimkovic, Menno Bakker, and others. Dimkovic was the author of the PsyTel codec, and the Nero AAC codec is said to be based on this work. Menno Bakker was the developer of

FAAC FAAC or Freeware Advanced Audio Coder is a software project which includes the AAC encoder FAAC and decoder FAAD2. It supports MPEG-2 AAC as well as MPEG-4 AAC. It supports several MPEG-4 Audio object types (LC, Main, LTP for encoding and SBR, ...

, one of the earliest widely available AAC encoders, and also what would become its companion decoder, FAAD. The Nero AAC codec became a stand-alone package around 2006, although still called Nero Digital Audio until 2009. Nero apparently still uses the codec in its products. Neither Dimkovic nor Bakker currently work at Nero, and development of the codec has stalled, but the software is stable and remains a reliable, and high-quality, option for AAC encoding.

References

External links

*
Nero AAC
at HydrogenAudio Knowledgebase
Download page
at ReallyRareWares {{Compression Software Implementations, state=collapsed Audio codecs Cross-platform software

Components and Capabilities

History

See also

References

External links