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AAC is a tragedy. almost as widely supported as MP3, a lot more efficient, and similarly patent-free at this point, but in practice a bad experience because only Apple have a good encoder for it, and FFmpeg's default encoder is terrible, so most AAC audio out there sounds awful
this means that despite being much less efficient, MP3 is effectively the better format because there's a great encoder for it called LAME that's been around forever and is open-source, so everyone uses it
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@leo@60228.dev
@hikari to be completely fair in 2025 if the "compatibility vs. efficiency" tradeoff is even slightly leaning towards the latter Opus makes way more sense
@hikari Fraunhofer's encoder is available in ffmpeg and is decent; it's just not in most builds because of GPL compat issues
ffmpeg's own AAC encoder *has* improved a lot, but development has kinda stagnated since the existence of opus kinda makes it mostly obsolete