Page 1 of 1
Why is the recommended transcoding mp3 instead of m4a?

Posted:
Mon Jan 28, 2013 4:44 pm
by Doug0915
Just out of curiosity, what is the rationale for this? Seems like by default you would want to down transcode to m4a rather than mp3 as AAC is going to do much better at lower bit rates.
Re: Why is the recommended transcoding mp3 instead of m4a?

Posted:
Mon Jan 28, 2013 4:46 pm
by bushman4
JWPlayer, the flash player built into the web interface, did not support M4a natively when Subsonic was first written.
That would be my guess, but only Sindre can say what Sindre was thinking...
Glenn
Re: Why is the recommended transcoding mp3 instead of m4a?

Posted:
Mon Jan 28, 2013 5:36 pm
by daneren2005
Because everything under the sun supports mp3. It is getting better more recently with aac but even a couple of years ago most stuff still didn't support it very well.
Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk 2
Re: Why is the recommended transcoding mp3 instead of m4a?

Posted:
Mon Jan 28, 2013 6:30 pm
by Doug0915
bushman4 wrote:JWPlayer, the flash player built into the web interface, did not support M4a natively when Subsonic was first written.
That would be my guess, but only Sindre can say what Sindre was thinking...
Glenn
Ahh..makes sense.
thanks!
Re: Why is the recommended transcoding mp3 instead of m4a?

Posted:
Wed Jun 12, 2013 6:05 pm
by Doug0915
daneren2005 wrote:Because everything under the sun supports mp3. It is getting better more recently with aac but even a couple of years ago most stuff still didn't support it very well.
Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk 2
old thread I know...
The reason I was asking is because usually when I'm doing on the fly transcoding it's because I'm in a situation where I'm bandwidth constrained (like on a flakey cell tower). In that situation I want the best quality I can get at a low bitrate (say 64kbps). AAC does a LOT better than mp3 at those bitrates. Ogg even better (amazingly better at 64).