MeldaProduction

nessbeth · Post by **nessbeth** » Sat Dec 27, 2014 10:43 pm

Hi,

I am wondering why its not possible to load also m4a, aac files into MCompare? These file types are not that uncommon on Macs...

MeldaProduction · Post by **MeldaProduction** » Sat Dec 27, 2014 11:56 pm

Hi, I'm afraid it is not and won't be possible. I'd like to in a way force people to use some generally accepted standard - WAV for noncompressed, FLAC for loseless and MP3 for lossy. Also AAC is patented and they require fees for using the format even for decoding, despite it seems many companies ignore that, I'm not and I'm definitely against using such a format, especially since there are free alternatives of the same quality.

As a sidenote about the patents, just from me, unrelated - like Apple is forcing people to use AAC, because they probably have significant fees from it, fireware was some day considered a standard and there was a rumor, that audio interfaces must use fireware to run properly. It was another disturbing lie most people eventually believed and the only reason was that fireware was patented, so there was some company getting money from it. From my experience not only firewire wasn't better than USB in any way, it is from my experience extremely unreliable... yet people believed what they believed... next one is thunderbolt...

Obsolete187521 · Post by **Obsolete187521** » Sat Jan 03, 2015 9:50 pm

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valerian_777 · Post by **valerian_777** » Sat Jan 03, 2015 10:04 pm

Taggable? Then you can use FLAC.

Obsolete187521 · Post by **Obsolete187521** » Sat Jan 03, 2015 10:42 pm

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valerian_777 · Post by **valerian_777** » Sat Jan 03, 2015 10:59 pm

Flac is supported by many DAWs.
40% is awesome for a loseless Format.
Future proof? You mean like mp3?

Sorry that your OS & Itunes dont allow you to use what you could (if you wanted to).

Anyway, afaik Aiff is supported yet.

MeldaProduction · Post by **MeldaProduction** » Sun Jan 04, 2015 6:42 pm

Hehe, so AIFF is supported already, noncompressed only, it's a mess for compressed version anyway.

Anyway, you were talking about m4a and aac. I already explained why I'm definitely against these. And actually there's just no reason to use these, except for the fact that Apple is trying to spread them to get even more money from developers, how sad... And these formats don't have much support. With mp3 you can be pretty much sure it will be supported, with these you cannot. And if you need really high quality with high compression ratio, just use 320kbps, I'm going to challenge you if you tell me that you can hear a difference between this and uncompressed.

For the record, FLAC indeed isn't so much supported yet, but it's the only standard loseless format. And actually it's not bad for the planet or electricity bill

. The HDD would take much more power, with lots of AIFFs instead you'd need bigger HDDs, which would cost more money and resources... etc let's not get philosophical

. FLAC takes quite a lot of power to encode, as all compression formats, but is very cheap to decode.

mesaone · Post by **mesaone** » Tue Jan 06, 2015 8:37 pm

BWF is the standard in professional work, from what I've seen. Same deal as WAV, just extra info in the header for metadata.

babel2 · Post by **babel2** » Tue Jan 06, 2015 10:46 pm

Does AAC/MP4 require fees to be utilised on a Mac or can your plugin tap into the native support within the operating system?

MeldaProduction · Post by **MeldaProduction** » Wed Jan 07, 2015 12:08 am

Not sure really... But I don't think so, it's per-application fee. And anyway I'm not going to support such a horrible behaviour.

Obsolete187521 · Post by **Obsolete187521** » Wed Jan 07, 2015 9:38 am

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whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Wed Jan 07, 2015 9:52 am

Widowsky wrote:wav are not the standard anymore

Ummm, yes they are.

since they are not taggable like mp3s.

Ummm, yes they are. Google 'soundminer metadata.'
WAV files, which are derivatives of RIFF files, could potentially have all sorts of data or tags added via the INFO chunk, or custom chunks; its just that there's no standard 'tag' support defined as part of the WAV spec.

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Wed Jan 07, 2015 10:01 am

Widowsky wrote:MP4 is an ISO standard! There is no fee!

However MP4 is a container not a single codec, and some of the filetypes it can contain rely on codecs which can require fees, ie there are fees if you want to write and distribute an AAC codec:

http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-fees.aspx

Obsolete187521 · Post by **Obsolete187521** » Wed Jan 07, 2015 10:37 am

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whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Wed Jan 07, 2015 11:10 am

Widowsky wrote:Come on, I'm sure we could reasonably agree that wav, flac and mp3 are standard on Windows and Android while aif, alac and mp4 are standard on Mac OS and iOS. And none of these OSes are dominant anymore.

Whilst WAV and AIFF have 'traditionally' been the filetype of choice for uncompressed audio on Windows and OSX respectively, I doubt there's many significant audio applications which dont handle both.
As for the other 4; I'd tend to disagree that there's that kind of platform-based specificity. For example, while iTunes is the main deliverer of AAC, that's to Windows and Macs, and almost all other downloadable audio services handle MP3 as their lossy compressed format, no matter what the target system.

Hmmm. What OS's than Windows, OSX, Android and iOS are dominant then?

Really “no standard 'tag' support defined as part of the WAV spec” is what I meant by “not taggable like mp3s”. And indeed when I buy a wav (yes I'm doing that! ), it is never tagged.

But it could be tagged, which was my point.

MeldaProduction

KVR Audio

MCompare - File Types