Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) can be a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Created to function as the successor in the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates.

 

AAC continues to be standardized by ISO and IEC, included in the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 specifications. The MPEG-2 standard contains several audio coding methods, such as MP3 coding scheme. AAC will be able to include 48 full-bandwidth (nearly 96 kHz) audio channels available as one stream plus 16 LF effects channels, as much as 16 "coupling" or dialog channels, and up to 16 data streams. The product quality for stereo is satisfactory to modest requirements at 96 kbps in joint stereo mode; however, hi-fi transparency demands data rates of at least 128 kbps (VBR). The MPEG-2 audio tests demonstrated that AAC meets certain requirements termed as "transparent" for that ITU at 128 kbps for stereo, and 320 kbps for five.1 audio.

 

AAC is also the default or standard audio format for: Apple's iTunes, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Sony's Ps3 and it is based on Sony's PlayStation Portable, phones from Sony Ericsson, latest generation of Sony Walkman, the latest S40 and S60 models from Nokia, Android based phones, Nintendo's Wii, plus the MPEG-4 video standard.

 

AAC offers sampling frequencies between 8 kHz and 96 kHz and a variety of channels between 1 and 48. Contrary to MP3's hybrid filter bank, AAC uses the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) with the increased window lengths of 1024 or 960 points.

 

The MPEG-4 audio coding algorithm family spans the number from low bitrate speech encoding (as a result of 2 kbps)to high-quality audio coding(at 64 kbps per channel and better).

 

The MPEG-4 audio standard does not define an individual or small pair of highly efficient compression schemes but alternatively a complex toolbox to do a lots of operations from low bitrate speech coding to high-quality audio coding and music synthesis.

 

AAC can be utilized on DVB, HDTV, iPhone, iTunes and iPod, iPad, Apple TV, PDA ，mobile phone and so on.

 

You are able to play AAC on ffdshow, Winamp, The KM Player, iTunes, VLC, XBMC,Windows Media Player, etc.