MP3 v.s AAC

We all know AAC is a better and newer audio encoding format comparing with MP3. However, few people know AAC is not always better solution than MP3.

One sentence summary of AAC's advantage is, AAC provides a better sound quality in same bitrate, and smaller bitrate in same sound quality.

This sentence is absolutely correct. However, the "sound quality" is very depend on audience feeling.

General to say, on portable music player, ordinary people can verify the difference between 64Kb and 192Kb; but few can say the difference in 192Kb and 256Kb. If a song is compressed in 320Kb with MP3, italmost means lossless on portable music player.

So, I will say if you compress a song with LAME in --preset extreme, then you will get same sound quality as compressing in AAC 0.5 quality.

Yes, we can get smaller file-size with AAC, but it doesn't matter for me. I compared same song in MP3 and AAC. The difference is about 20%. With a little bit large file-size, I get much more compatibility. MP3 is supported by all music player.

So I choose MP3 as my music database format.