Low bitrate and mono

for mobile devices, HE and PS profiles of AAC have a pretty broad support in hardware over the last 5 years. most J2ME/Brew included, and of course any of the newer "soft" models with decent CPUs basically all have support for most of MPEG4 that’s used right now.

for mono, HE profile AAC is decent, and depending on the sample rate & the content you can get down below 16kbps (not including transmission protocol overhead).

but with PS profile AAC you can get a pretty darn good sounding stereo 44.1kHz at rates of 24kbps area (without overhead) so… and combine that with the probability of people plugging headphones of some kind into their phones these days… that’s an option that would be silly to ignore – more and more as we progress along the current path.

not to mention 24kbps 44kHz stereo PS-AAC sounding pretty great in cars too. 8)

if you want low bitrate mono for mostly speech only… XIPH’s Speex codec is the way to rock.
http://www.speex.org/

[quote author=”sneradio”]AAC+ @ 24kbps 32kHz stereo sounds fairly decent as my station will demonstrate. Check it out at http://loudcity.com/stations/soft-n-eas … isten.html[/quote]

HE or PS profile? That’s an important factor at those bitrates.

I’ll poke Ed about setting EdCast up on sf.net or something. I don’t know how many people would be interested (or capable) of making it better, but it’s worth a shot I guess. Ed’s pretty crazy busy working for Ando over the last 5+ years.

For 99% of use though, the presets that CT put into its codec (use the newest version possible) that the regular EdCast uses is as good a quality as you can get anyways. Only in specialized situations does that other version offer any advantage. In my opinion.