“As you’ve probably heard by now, Apple just announced plans to ditch DRM for good. That means all songs you purchase from iTunes will arrive on your PC without the usual copy-protection shackles,” Rick Broida blogs for PC World.
MacDailyNews Take: Actually, Rick, they’ll arrive on our Macs. Because we have brains.
Broida continues, “However, this doesn’t give you carte blanche. Because Apple still encodes songs using the proprietary AAC format, your downloads won’t play in many phones, PDAs, MP3 players, and so on.”
MacDailyNews Take: Rick, you ignorant slut, AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is no more proprietary than MP3. AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer, AT&T, Sony, and Nokia; companies that have also been involved in the development of audio codecs such as Dolby Digital (AC3) and your ignorantly beloved dinosaur MP3. AAC has also been adopted by the major standards organizations including the ISO MPEG (MPEG-4), 3GPP and 3GPP2, DVB, as well as Sirius XM satellite radio.
Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC demonstrates greater sound quality than MP3 files encoded at the same bit rate.
Along with Apple’s market-dominating iTunes jukebox, iTunes Store, iPods, and iPhones, AAC is the standard audio format for Sony’s PlayStation 3 and is supported by Sony’s Playstation Portable, latest generation of Sony Walkman, Walkman Phones from Sony Ericsson, The BBC, Adobe’s Flash Nseries Phones from Nokia, Nintendo’s Wii, the Nintendo DSi, Creative Zen Portable, Microsoft Zune, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows Mobile devices, Epson P-2000 and P-4000, Sony Reader, Sonos Digital Media Player, SanDisk Sansa, Roku SoundBridge, Logitech Squeezebox, Slacker G2 Personal Radio Player, Nokia XpressMusic multimedia phones, RIM’s latest series of BlackBerry phones, and the MPEG-4 video standard, among many others. High-Efficiency AAC is part of digital radio standards like DAB+ and Digital Radio Mondiale.
AAC was designed to fix many of the serious performance flaws in the antiquated MP3 format. Improvements include:
• More sample frequencies (from 8 kHz to 96 kHz) than MP3 (16 kHz to 48 kHz)
• Up to 48 channels (MP3 supports up to two channels in MPEG-1 mode and up to 5.1 channels in MPEG-2 mode)
• Arbitrary bit-rates and variable frame length. Standardized constant bit rate with bit reservoir.
• Higher efficiency and simpler filterbank (rather than MP3’s hybrid coding, AAC uses a pure MDCT)
• Higher coding efficiency for stationary signals (AAC uses a blocksize of 1024 samples, allowing more efficient coding than MP3’s 576 sample blocks)
• Higher coding accuracy for transient signals (AAC uses a blocksize of 128 samples, allowing more accurate coding than MP3’s 192 sample blocks)
• Can use Kaiser-Bessel derived window function to eliminate spectral leakage at the expense of widening the main lobe
• Much better handling of audio frequencies above 16 kHz
• More flexible joint stereo (different methods can be used in different frequency ranges)
By the way, Apple’s iPods and iPhones support not only AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), but also Protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV out of the box.
Broida continues, “Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to convert iTunes Plus purchases to the universally compatible MP3 format.”
MacDailyNews Take: Only if you own a device that is incapable of playing AAC, should you consider using the antiquated MP3 format. If your devices support AAC, use AAC. AAC is more efficient than MP3, resulting in smaller, better-sounding files that will actually extend your device’s battery life due to more efficient decoding.
Broida’s full article, for what it’s worth, which is nothing, is here.
MacDailyNews Note: Contact PC World Editors at
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Shieldzee” for the heads up.]