What is AAC?
AAC is short for Advanced Audio Coding, AAC is an audio codec that has better audio quality and compression when compared with MP3.
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardised, lossy digital audio compression scheme. It was developed with the cooperation and contributions of companies mainly including Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony and Nokia, and was officially declared an international standard by the Moving Pictures Experts Group in April of 1997. It was written into specification as Part 7 of the MPEG-2 standard, and again into Part 3 of the MPEG-4 standard. As such, AAC can be referred to as MPEG-2 Part 7 and MPEG-4 Part 3 depending on its implementation, but is most often referred to as MPEG-4 AAC, or AAC for short. AAC was designed as an improved-performance codec relative to MP3 (which was specified in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2) by the ISO/IEC in 11172-3 and 13818-3.
AAC was promoted as the successor to MP3 for audio coding at medium to high bitrates. Its popularity is currently maintained by it being the default iTunes codec, the media player which powers iPod, the most popular digital audio player on the market. Furthermore, the iTunes Store, whose sales account for 85% of the market for legal online downloads, sells AAC-encoded songs (encapsulated with FairPlay Digital Rights Management).
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