Why is the recommended transcoding mp3 instead of m4a?

[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.

[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

[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

[Doug0915]

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!

[Doug0915]

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).