FAAC

Last updated
FAAC
Original author(s) Menno Bakker and others
Initial releaseOctober 9, 2001 (2001-10-09)
Stable release
1.30 / April 28, 2020;3 years ago (2020-04-28)
Repository
Written in C
Platform Cross-platform
Available inEnglish
Type Encoder
License LGPL 2.1
Website sourceforge.net/projects/faac/ faac.sourceforge.net
FAAD2
Original author(s) Menno Bakker, Nero AG and others
Initial release2000 (FAAD1)
Stable release
2.10.0 / October 20, 2020;3 years ago (2020-10-20)
Repository github.com/knik0/faad2
Written in C
Operating system Cross-platform
Available inEnglish
Type Decoder
License GNU General Public License version 2 or later
Website sourceforge.net/projects/faac/ faac.sourceforge.net

FAAC (Freeware Advanced Audio Coder) is a software project which includes the AAC encoder FAAC and decoder FAAD2. It supports MPEG-2 AAC as well as MPEG-4 AAC. It supports several MPEG-4 Audio object types (LC, Main, LTP for encoding and SBR, PS, ER, LD for decoding), file formats (ADTS AAC, raw AAC, MP4), multichannel and gapless encoding/decoding and MP4 metadata tags. The encoder and decoder is compatible with standard-compliant audio applications using one or more of these object types and facilities. [1] It also supports Digital Radio Mondiale. [2]

Contents

FAAC and FAAD2, being distributed in C source code form, can be compiled on various platforms and are distributed free of charge. FAAD2 is free software. FAAC contains some code which is published as Free Software, but as a whole it is only distributed under a proprietary license.

FAAC was originally written by Menno Bakker. [3]

FAAC encoder

FAAC stands for Freeware Advanced Audio Coder. [4] The FAAC encoder is an audio compression computer program that creates AAC (MPEG-2 AAC/MPEG-4 AAC [5] ) sound files from other formats (usually, CD-DA audio files). It contains a library (libfaac) that can be used by other programs. [6] AAC files are commonly used in computer programs and portable music players, being Apple Inc.'s recommended format for the company's iPod music player.

Some of the features that FAAC has are: cross-platform support, "reasonably" fast encoding, support for more than one "object type" of the AAC format, multi-channel encoding, and support for Digital Radio Mondiale streams. It also supports multi-channel streams, like 5.1. [7] The MPEG-4 object types of the AAC format supported by FAAC are the "Low Complexity" (LC), "Main", and "Long Term Prediction" (LTP). [2] The MPEG-2 AAC profiles supported by FAAC are LC and Main. [8] The SBR and PS object types are not supported, so the HE-AAC and HE-AACv2 profiles are also not supported. The object type "Low Complexity" is the default and also happens to be used in videos meant to be playable for portable players (like Apple's iPod) and used by video-hosting sites (like YouTube).

FAAC has been evaluated as a somewhat "lower quality" option than other aac encoders. [9]

Alternatives for AAC encoding in Unix-like operating systems

FAAC is one of six alternatives that Linux/Unix users have for creating AAC files. The others are:

FAAD2 decoder

FAAD2 is Freeware Advanced Audio (AAC) Decoder including SBR decoding. [21] It is MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AAC decoder and supports MPEG-4 audio object types LC, Main, LTP, LD, ER, SBR and PS, which can be combined also to HE-AAC and HE-AACv2 Profile (AAC LC+SBR+PS). [22] [23] It contains a library (libfaad) that can be used by other programs.

FAAD and FAAD2 were originally written by Menno Bakker from Nero AG. [21] [24] FAAD2 is the successor to FAAD1, which was deprecated.

FAAD is Freeware Advanced Audio Decoder. It was first released in 2000 and it did not support SBR and PS audio object types. [22] [24] [25] The last version of FAAD1 was 2002-01-04. All development later focused in FAAD2. [26] The SBR decoding support (HE-AAC) was added in the version release on 25 July 2003. FAAD2 version 2.0 was released on 6 February 2004. [21] [27]

Licensing

FAAC contains code based on the ISO MPEG-4 reference code, whose license is not compatible with the LGPL license. [2] Only the FAAC changes to this ISO MPEG-4 reference code are licensed under the LGPL license. [2] The ISO MPEG-4 reference software was published as ISO/IEC 14496-5 (MPEG-4 Part 5: Reference software) and it is freely available for download from ISO website. [28] [29] ISO/IEC gives users of the MPEG-2 NBC/MPEG-4 Audio standards free license to this software module or modifications thereof for use in hardware or software products claiming conformance to the MPEG-2 NBC/MPEG-4 Audio standards. Those intending to use this software module in hardware or software products are advised that this use may infringe existing patents. [3] [30] [31]

FAAD2 is licensed under the GPL v2 (and later GPL versions). Code from FAAD2 is copyright of Nero AG (the "appropriate copyright message" mentioned in section 2c of the GPLv2). [32] The source code contains a note that the use of this software may require the payment of patent royalties. Commercial non-GPL licensing of this software is also possible. [33]

FAAD (FAAD1) modifications to the ISO MPEG-4 AAC reference code were distributed under the GPL. [24]

Other software

FAAC and FAAD2 are used in the following software products and libraries:

There is also other software that uses FAAC libraries. [41]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MPlayer</span> Free and open source media player

MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A port for DOS using DJGPP is also available. Versions for the Wii Homebrew Channel and Amazon Kindle have also been developed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FFmpeg</span> Multimedia framework

FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of video and audio files. It is widely used for format transcoding, basic editing, video scaling, video post-production effects and standards compliance.

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. It was designed to be the successor of the MP3 format and generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 at the same bit rate.

mp3PRO is an unmaintained proprietary audio compression codec that combines the MP3 audio format with the spectral band replication (SBR) compression method. At the time it was developed it could reduce the size of a stereo MP3 by as much as 50% while maintaining the same relative quality. This works, fundamentally, by discarding the higher half of the frequency range and algorithmically replicating that information while decoding.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spectral band replication</span> Low bitrate digital audio enhancement technique

Spectral band replication (SBR) is a technology to enhance audio or speech codecs, especially at low bit rates and is based on harmonic redundancy in the frequency domain.

3GP is a multimedia container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for 3G UMTS multimedia services. It is used on 3G mobile phones but can also be played on some 2G and 4G phones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding</span> Audio codec

High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an audio coding format for lossy data compression of digital audio defined as an MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/IEC 14496–3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC (AAC-LC) optimized for low-bitrate applications such as streaming audio. The usage profile HE-AAC v1 uses spectral band replication (SBR) to enhance the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) compression efficiency in the frequency domain. The usage profile HE-AAC v2 couples SBR with Parametric Stereo (PS) to further enhance the compression efficiency of stereo signals.

TwinVQ is an audio compression technique developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) Human Interface Laboratories in 1994. The compression technique has been used in both standardized and proprietary designs.

MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosine transform (DCT), similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 Part 2 and H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2.

Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are two different Flash Video file formats: FLV and F4V. The audio and video data within FLV files are encoded in the same way as SWF files. The F4V file format is based on the ISO base media file format, starting with Flash Player 9 update 3. Both formats are supported in Adobe Flash Player and developed by Adobe Systems. FLV was originally developed by Macromedia. In the early 2000s, Flash Video was the de facto standard for web-based streaming video. Users include Hulu, VEVO, Yahoo! Video, metacafe, Reuters.com, and many other news providers.

libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a variety of audio coding formats.

MPEG-4 Audio Lossless Coding, also known as MPEG-4 ALS, is an extension to the MPEG-4 Part 3 audio standard to allow lossless audio compression. The extension was finalized in December 2005 and published as ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005/Amd 2:2006 in 2006. The latest description of MPEG-4 ALS was published as subpart 11 of the MPEG-4 Audio standard in December 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Libav</span> Multimedia framework

Libav is an abandoned free software project, forked from FFmpeg in 2011, that contains libraries and programs for handling multimedia data.

Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) is an audio compression format and codec for both music and speech or any mix of speech and audio using very low bit rates between 12 and 64 kbit/s. It was developed by Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and was published as an international standard ISO/IEC 23003-3 and also as an MPEG-4 Audio Object Type in ISO/IEC 14496-3:2009/Amd 3 in 2012.

VisualOn is a Silicon Valley–based multimedia software company that provides high-definition audio and video entertainment to smartphones, tablets, laptops, connected TVs and other mobile and convergent devices. VisualOn's patented technology is modular and platform-agnostic. VisualOn supports streaming, VOD, mobile TV and other multimedia applications.

Fraunhofer FDK AAC is an open-source library for encoding and decoding digital audio in the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. Fraunhofer IIS, developed this library for Android 4.1. It supports several Audio Object Types including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AAC LC, HE-AAC, HE-AACv2 as well AAC-LD and AAC-ELD for real-time communication. The encoding library supports sample rates up to 96 kHz and up to eight channels.

Nero AAC Codec is a set of software tools for encoding and decoding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format audio, and editing MPEG-4 metadata. It was developed and distributed by Nero AG, and is available at no cost for Windows and Linux for non-commercial use. The codec was originally part of Nero Digital, but was later released as a stand-alone package.

References

  1. ↑ "Freeware Advanced Audio Coder". ohloh.net. Archived from the original on 2009-06-23. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  2. 1 2 3 4 AudioCoding.com. "FAAC" . Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  3. 1 2 FAAC (2001-09-04). "SCM Repositories – faac – README". SF.net. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  4. ↑ FAAC Source – README (ZIP), Sourceforge, retrieved 2009-11-03
  5. ↑ "Freeware Advanced Audio Coder". Sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  6. ↑ FAAC (2003-08-07). "FAAC – ISO/MPEG 2/4 AAC Encoder Library version 1.0". SCM Repositories. Retrieved 2009-11-04.
  7. ↑ PS3 H264/AAC 5.1 Encoding with FFmpeg – SpinOneSolutions Archived 2013-01-19 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ↑ "Ubuntu Packages – libfaac-dev". Canonical Ltd. 2009. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  9. ↑ AudioCoding.com – FAAC
  10. ↑ "NOTICE file in FDK source".
  11. ↑ "Fraunhofer FDK AAC information".
  12. ↑ "Nero AAC Codec". Nero AG. 2006. Retrieved 2010-12-10.
  13. ↑ "Nero AAC" . Retrieved 3 October 2013.
  14. ↑ [FFmpeg-devel] Internal aac development progress
  15. ↑ "FFmpeg AACの音質評価".
  16. ↑ "AACEncodingGuide – FFmpeg".
  17. ↑ "GuidelinesHighQualityAudio – FFmpeg".
  18. ↑ "December 5th, 2015, The native FFmpeg AAC encoder is now stable!". ffmpeg.org. Retrieved 26 June 2016.
  19. ↑ http://superuser.com/a/370637/39364 – only supports 2 channels http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-user/2012-February/005187.html
  20. ↑ http://tipok.org.ua/node/17 – only supports 2 channels http://betterlogic.com/roger/2012/07/libaacplus-maximum-number-of-channels/ Archived 2013-10-04 at the Wayback Machine
  21. 1 2 3 FAAD2 Source – README (ZIP), Sourceforge, retrieved 2009-11-03
  22. 1 2 "Debian packages – libfaad2". May 2006. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  23. ↑ AudioCoding.com. "FAAD2" . Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  24. 1 2 3 FAAC (2000-02-18). "SCM Repositories – faad – README, revision 1.1". SF.net. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  25. ↑ FAAC (2001-09-04). "SCM Repositories – faad – README, revision 1.8". SF.net. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  26. ↑ FAAC (2002-01-04). "Freeware Advanced Audio Coder – File Release Notes and Changelog – 2002-01-04 – last release". SF.net. Archived from the original on 2011-02-10. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  27. ↑ FAAC (2009). "SCM Repositories – faad2 – ChangeLog". SF.net. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  28. ↑ "AAC Reference Software". MultimediaWiki. 2009-02-23. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  29. ↑ ISO (2009-10-27). "Freely Available Standards". ISO. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  30. ↑ FAAC (2004-10-17). "SCM Repositories – faac – README". SF.net. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  31. ↑ ISO, Information technology – Coding of audio-visual objects – Part 5: Reference software – Amendment 20: MPEG-1 and -2 on MPEG-4 reference software and BSAC extensions (ZIP), ISO, retrieved 2009-11-03
  32. ↑ "Debian packages – libfaad2 – copyright". Debian packages. May 2006. Archived from the original on 2009-11-15. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  33. ↑ FAAC (2007-11-01). "SCM Repositories – faad2 – README". SF.net. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  34. ↑ "Avidemux-Audio encoders". avidemux.org. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  35. ↑ "CDex Features". CDex project. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  36. ↑ FFmpeg. "General Documentation – Audio Codecs" . Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  37. ↑ FFmpeg. "FFmpeg Changelog" . Retrieved 2010-12-10.
  38. ↑ GStreamer. "GStreamer Bad Plugins 0.10 Plugins Reference Manual". gstreamer.org. Archived from the original on 2009-11-09. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  39. ↑ MPlayer team. "MPlayer – The Movie Player – Codec installation – AAC". MPlayer team. Archived from the original on 2009-10-06. Retrieved 2009-11-14.
  40. ↑ VideoLAN Wiki (2006-03-08). "Advanced Audio Coding". VideoLAN Wiki. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
  41. ↑ Audiocoding.com. "Programs using FAAC or FAAD". Archived from the original on 2009-10-05. Retrieved 2009-11-03.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.