Apple AAC

QuickTime AAC is known to be one of the highest quality medium-bitrate CBR LC AAC encoders and is also another commercial AAC implementation. Whilst the current version only supports 2 channel audio, it is hoped multi-channel support, along with VBR encoding will be added in a future version.

Although this is a comercial implementation and part of the QuickTime Pro package, the codec is available for free through the iTunes Digital Jukebox

Update: It is rumored that the next major version of Apple's codec (included in iTunes 5.0, as a part of iLife 5.0 in Mac OSX Tiger to be released early in 2005) will support AAC HE & VBR encoding.

More information can be found at the Apple Website

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