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Playing iTunes' AAC-encoded music on a PC
Authored by: toddsnc on May 14, '03 09:05:03AM
Frauenhofer (the default iTunes MP3 encoder) clips @ 16K Hz for "psycho-acoustic reasons," meaning very few people can hear frequencies above that. it also saves space as a lot of information is being dropped in the fastest-changing waveforms.

For people with vintage 1990 computer speakers (or laptop speakers) this is probably fine, but newer speakers are much better at reproducing the entire audio spectrum (typically 20-20K Hz) and some people can hear them while many others can feel them to some degree, or at least have some vague feeling something is missing. You can fire up a program like amadeus, open a spectrum analyzer window and watch the sound.

LAME typically encodes the entire frequency range (20-20K) and produces sonically superior MP3s. AAC appears to do the same, with much lower CPU overhead (anyone who's used the LAME plug-in for iTunes knows what I mean). There's no reason not to use the AAC format, except of course that you have to pay for QT Pro.

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