On May 24, 2015, at 6:02 AM, Vojtěch Meluzín <
email@hidden> wrote:
From what I have read AAC is trademarked by Apple even for decoding…
Really? I have no idea what kind of crazy stuff you’re reading (4chan?) but it’s clearly not Wikipedia.
"AAC was developed with the cooperation and contributions of companies including AT&T Bell Laboratories, Fraunhofer IIS, Dolby Laboratories,Sony Corporation and Nokia. It was officially declared an international standard by the Moving Picture Experts Group in April 1997. It is specified both as Part 7 of the MPEG-2 standard, and Subpart 4 in Part 3 of the MPEG-4 standard.”
"Advanced Audio Coding is designed to be the successor of the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, known as MP3 format…"
"No licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format.[35] This reason alone can make AAC a much more attractive format to distribute content than its predecessor MP3"
Also, I don’t understand why you keep going on about trademarks, which have nothing to do with this at all. You might want to read up on the differences between trademarks and patents.
Also there's M4A and other weird formats…
.m4a is simply a common filename extension used for MPEG4 files containing AAC audio.
I have no idea why we cannot stick with simple MP3 for lossy and FLAC for loseless…
Because MP3 is not only an inferior codec, it’s also heavily encumbered by patents, with many companies claiming to own rights and demanding royalties for shipping both encoders and decoders. It’s kind of ridiculous, actually: