I have downloaded the latest and greatest Nero Burning Rom and enjoy the MP4 audio encoder that comes with it however, am desperately looking for a good recommendation on a media player that can support this format. I've tried Windows Media Player, WinAMP, DivX v5.0.2 and so far, none of these programs support this format. Sure could use some help. Am thinking about encoding my mp3PRO library to mp4 as the files are much smaller and quality is the same if not better. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank You_X_X_X_X_X_[small]~ What doesn't kill you will only make you stronger, or just hurt ~[/small]
Quicktime 6 supposedly supports MP4, but that can't be the best solution, I'll keep checking. Why don't you just search google like I did?
I did do a search however, mainly pertains to video files, not audio. Had thought about that. Thanks If I find something, will be sure to post a link or something. BlkPnthr
Well, As I mentioned in my previous statement, it supports MPEG-4 (mp4?) video files, however, in terms of audio files, it doesn't. Gives me an error code all the time and then when I do a search for the codec, it tells me that it can't find it. I did find a SMALL program that play's mp4's but, NO where near as sophisticated as Windows Media Player or WinAMP. BlkPnthr
I encoded music in Nero 5.5 as you did and am able to play the mp4 files fine on Quicktime 6. Apple even has a link from their quicktime page for audio only mp4 files. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/gallery/aac.html I have the full version of Nero that came with my burner but the mp4 encoding seems to be temporary. Anyone know how to buy the full version mp4 plugin for Nero? Thanks.
btw, I found an MP4 plugin for WinAmp. It works fine for WinAmp 2. http://www.audiocoding.com/mpeg-4.php
Is that link that was provided for the mp4 plug-in for winamp valid? I click on the link, (I am using IE ..newest version) and the screen comes up but, is blank...tells me that the program has finished decoding the page. What gives??? What setting do I need in IE to view this page???
I tried the above link and got the MP4 plugin for Winamp. I pulled out an Audio CD to try MPEG-4 at 64kbps (using Nero) and also in OGG 1.0 & MP3Pro at 64kbps. MP3Pro & OGG still sound a lot clearer than MP4 strangly when all encoded at 64.0kbps. I have tried various settings in Nero, but no matter what I choose, MP4 didn't sound as good as the other two, even when I ticked 'Enable PNS', 'High' for encoder quality and 'LT Prediction' for AAC profile. I haven't tried MP4 yet at higher bit rates. I'd say the reason for this is that Nero's MP4 encoder doesn't support AAC+SBR, like that of MP3Pro (i.e. MP3+SBR) and thus cannot enocde the high frequencies very well at low bit rates.
Well, all the encoding I do is at 128-bit or higher. for mp3PRO, it compresses it down to about 64-bits. Haven't tried burning it yet however, when I played the songs (mp3 vs. mp4) within the compilation screen, the mp4 sounded better then the mp3 for me and when I checked the file sizs, the mp4 was a good 1 MB smaller then the mp3 file. Still on the lookout for a good program to play mp4's. Something that you can create a playlist or library such as is Windows Media Library.
BlkPnthr, What's wrong with the audiocoding.com's MP4 WinAmp plugin? You can use it with WinAmp and many other players too. In the future Nero will ad AAC+ support and according to Ivan (the author) "it eats all other formats in low bitrates". BTW, Ivan recommends to use LC profile always, due to compatibility reasons.
I am not sure what is wrong with audiocoding.com's winamp mp4 plug-in. I have v3.0 of winamp, have installed the plug-in into both the plug-in directory and the program directory however, winamp refuses to play mp4's. I downloaded the plug-in again just to make sure it wasn't me (and it still very well could be). Yes, I saw what Ivan had written. This is still all very new to me so I don't want to come across like a pro (if you haven't already guessed). For whatever reason, I can't seem to find a good program to play mp4's. Winamp would do an awesome job if I could get the plug-in to work. Have you encoded an audio file to mp4 and then played it on winamp? Which directory do you have the plug-in installed in?
oh, just found out that MP4 plugin is released for Foobar2000. Thats a kickass audio player. MP4 plug: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jfe1205/foo_mp4.zip FB2k audio player: http://www.cd-rw.org/software/audio_software/audio_players/foobar2000.cfm
While Winamp 3 has a few nice features such as a Media Library, it's missing a lot of features that Winamp 2 had such as most of the configurations that Winamp 2 had. E.g. Winamp 3 supports very few if any Winamp 2 plugins. Winamp 3 has very few plugins on Winamp's website and as it has been out for quite a while now (including its betas & RC's), it shows that not many developers are interested in making plugins for it. I use both Winamp 2 & 3. While Winamp 2 supports the MP4 plugin for me I've already encoded over 100 albums in OGG vorbis at 128kbps several months ago and never encountered any glitches in any songs like I had with other codecs. I started encoding at 96kbps OGG without problems, but when I got an 80GB hard drive, I went up to 128kbps to be on the safe side. While OGG is now getting wide software support particularily in Linux hardware manufacturers such as Panasonic are interested on taking on the AAC format. AAC is having problems with software support as it requires more expensive licensing than MP3. I haven't even encountered a single software AAC+SBR (AACPlus) encoder yet.
Thanks....have downloaded foobar and will check it out. Also, Winamp v2.81 works well with mp4 files. I am thinking about converting all my mp3's to either mp3PRO or mp4's to free up some HDD space. Have quite a collection and would like to expand without having to upgrade to another HDD as I already have 2 HDD's running and my IDE cable is out of places to add another...not to mention slots to install the HDD.
I would advise NOT to convert MP3s, since cyclic lossy compression will cause significant quality loss. seanbyrne, MP4 AAC is backed by most major commerical parties. It already has playback support - Philips devices for an example. MP4 will be one cornerstone of the G3 mobile phone technology, for delivering compressed multimedia. 96kbps-128kbps is not enough for HiFi with any audio format, even though advanced formats like OGG Vorbis and AAC do decent. For HiFi I'd go for bitrates around 160-200kbps. Unfortunately, the OGG Vorbis is not tuned for high bitrates and the devs are concentrating for low bitrate tuning at the moment. I think proper MP3 encoding with LAME is still a better choice for HiFi compressed audio. Musepack on the other hand is THE highest quality lossy audio encoder, but it has the weakest position for future support (even though Musepack is based on MPEG-1 Layer II and seems to be going open source in the near future).
