Why xHE-AAC is being embraced at Meta

  • This codec isn’t supported on the web. So it is Android and iOS only. This post talks about the improved audio quality, but I don’t buy it. This was probably done to reduce storage and bandwidth, not to improve audio quality. Phone speakers aren’t good enough to notice.

    Also, I wish they had backed opus…

  • Looks like xHE-AAC beats opus on <32 kbps/s must be important for FB at their traffic scale

    Topic: A Session In The Abyss: xHE-AAC vs OPUS at 12, 24 and 32 kbps (voice & music) (Read 16655 times) https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,120997.0.html

    xHE-AAC vs HE-AAC v2 Audio Quality Comparison: War of the Low-Bitrate Codecs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74SsKOUHgvo

  • As far as I know, xHE-AAC has no advantages over Opus, however, Opus is free from patent licensing.

  • Exhale - Open Source USAC / xHE-AAC encoder

    https://gitlab.com/ecodis/exhale

  • Have fun downloading from Instagram or Facebook in the future. Besides VLC, what software can play this format? What does the licensing look like? Will it take 20 years until I can actually use it (at least patents weren't disneyfied)?

  • How long until the patents expire?

  • Sooo... How is the loudness management feature not just a reimplementation of "mp3 replay gain" that was introduced over 20 years ago?

  • Anybody else noticed that after following the link, the back button does not indicate that there is a page to go back. This is on Firefox on Linux. Wtf?

    [edited: punctuation]

  • great, thanks for using more patented crap.

  •     <img title="Audio stock hero">