AAC or MP3 - which version you prefer?

[4damind]

There are a lot of statements since some time that AAC has a better quality and so it's recommended by more and more people.
Which format do you prefer or you plan to use in the future for your tracks for local listening, streaming or for your mobile devices.
I don't speak about your mastered tracks which you (hopefully) have in a lossless version

[PurpleSunray]

Hmm I would need multiple choices:

> for your tracks for local listening
FLAC

> streaming or for your mobile devices.
AAC

[4damind]

Hmm I would need multiple choices:

> for your tracks for local listening
FLAC

> streaming or for your mobile devices.
AAC

You have multiple choices (2)

[PurpleSunray]

oh.. lol

[BertKoor]

What I heard about it so far, the quality of AAC is significantly better (compared to MP3) at the lower bitrates. Where MP3 has a minimal bitrate of 128kbps to be listenable, with AAC even 64kbps can be quite passable (used in DAB+ digital radio for instance)

With bitrates higher than 160kbps the differences between MP3 and AAC are virtually nonexistent. So to me the poll options don't make much sense...

[PurpleSunray]

Well, looking at the codec details, AAC brings a lot advantages over MP3.
Both use more or less same psychoacoustic modell, but the way the encoders work is quite different.
On AAC you can have flexible window sizes, you do can frequency-dependent stereo-join, which can save a lot of bits (i.e. bassline has no stereo image -> join it to mono, while voice has stereo image, so code it to M+S), ect. pp.
In general an AAC encoder has way more flexiblity when encoding the stream, than an MP3 encoder has.

Ok, you can now argue that on high bitrate, a human cannot hear a difference anyhow.
The advantages of the AAC encoder will manifest itself in less noise floor or THD other stuff you cannot hear anyhow- you need tools to analyze the difference. But still, the AAC encoder will be more efficent. It will need less bits to store same quality as an MP3 encoder.
So with AAC, I can either have more tracks on my mobile, or I can have same amount of tracks, but with better quality.

[AsPeeXXXVIII]

Never fiddled around with AAC, but I do like my MP3. Even 128kbps MP3's are completely listenable as far as I'm concerned. I never was a quality snob anyway.

[fmr]

I use MP3 320 for music stored in my computer (mainly for a matter of compatibility), but for some kinds of music (mainly classical music, especially the more dense orchestral music) I use lossless compressed formats instead.

[4damind]

AAC is in my opinion considered as the future of lossy digital audio. So there is the question if people still prefer MP3 because it's the most used format and the " king of compatibility" or is it more because of some other reasons?

[PurpleSunray]

For me it was a conscious decission to use AAC.
If I buy tracks, I want it lossless. I don't buy tracks if I cannot get a wav/flac/aiff.
My music collection is all lossless.

When I copy to mobile directly from PC, I just drag & drop the file on explorer.
Windows transcodes it automatically to WMA (this option is missing your poll )
If the mobile is not attach to my PC and I need to manually convert, I use AAC.
There is no point for me on using mp3. AAC is better in all regards and compatiblity issue does not exist, since all my devices can play AAC.

[starflakeprj]

What happened to OGG? A better choice than both MP3 and AAC , IMO.

[cron]

AAC is in my opinion considered as the future of lossy digital audio. So there is the question if people still prefer MP3 because it's the most used format and the " king of compatibility" or is it more because of some other reasons?

We're already a generation beyond! Opus kicks AAC's arse at lower bitrates. Youtube is already serving its more popular videos with Opus audio, but there's little support elsewhere AFAIK.

As for me, I listen to FLAC at home and MP3 on the go. While my devices support AAC, I don't really know that much about encoding it. I gather iTunes has the best encoder, but I prefer not to use it wherever possible. I know my quality settings for mp3 inside out too, and I don't really feel like I'm missing the disk space I'd save using AAC.

Well, come to think of it, I mostly listen to things temp downloaded from Spotify when out and about these days rather than physically moving my existing files on to my device (thus avoiding dealing with iTunes), so I suppose I'm technically listening to 320 Ogg (Ogg's quality is broadly comparable to AAC's) more often than anything else.

[PurpleSunray]

What happened to OGG? A better choice than both MP3 and AAC , IMO.

No Opus on my Android 4.3 :/
Would also use it instead of AAC, but with OGG I acutally do have the compatiblity issue.

[cron]

What happened to OGG? A better choice than both MP3 and AAC , IMO.

No Opus on my Android 4.3 :/
Would also use it instead of AAC, but with OGG I acutally do have the compatiblity issue.

starflakeprj: Opus is essentially the next generation version of ogg - it's managed by the same organisation: Xiph. Not entirely their work this time though - it builds on a combination of Xiph's CELT (Xiph's planned ogg/Speex successor) and Skype's SILK format. It automatically switches to a different encoding style for speech signals and is much lower latency than ogg/AAC/mp3, great for 'real-time' telephony as well as sounding better generally.

PurpleSunray: Yeah, I wish ogg (and now Opus) had better hardware support. I guess adding a hardware decoder is expensive, while battery life implications could affect decisions to support it in software at the OS level - it's the difference between people saying "Spotify kills my battery" and "iOS kills my battery".

[PurpleSunray]

Opus is essentially the next generation version of ogg

Opus is an audio codec, ogg is a container format. You can also pack Vorbis or Speex into an ogg.
Don't mix it up