Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Snow Leapord support for aacPlus

I just noticed that the Snow Leopard Quicktime player now plays aacPlus over http via a .pls file right out of the box. If you get info while playing an aacPlus stream, it doesn't say anything special to indicate it's aacPlus: just AC, 2 channels, 22050hz. But it really is playing back as a 44.1 stream (remember that aacPlus synthesizes all audio over 10khz).

Strangely, though, RTSP streams in quicktime are NOT playing back in aacPlus! The are played back only as AAC (and hence sound like they're 22khz files rather than 44.1.)

To try it out, open up http://somafm.com/groovesalad48.pls from within Quicktime Player. You don't get Metadata but you do get the stream in full fidelity.

Now try the RTSP version:

rtsp://64.202.98.91:554/gs.sdp

Also, seems that the new Quicktime X doesn't support QTL files anymore. (This breaks all the quicktime links on the SomaFM site, we can change them to .mov files).

PS- Rumor is tomorrow's announcement of iTunes 9 will include aacPlus playback. That would indeed be exciting is that was the case!

Labels: , , ,

4 Comments:

Anonymous Paul C. said...

Having just downloaded iTunes 9, I've fed the above Groove Salad URL into it and it's playing wonderfully!

September 9, 2009 12:27 PM  
OpenID briandigital said...

I couldn't get your first link to work in QuickTime X directly, but just clicking on the .pls in Safari opened it within iTunes 9 beautifully! Here's to taking up less bandwidth for both of us!

Now, has anyone tried this in iPhone 3.1?

September 9, 2009 8:11 PM  
Blogger Michael Miller said...

Interesting. iTunes 9 indeed displayed Groove Salad's aacPlus stream on my Mac and the info shows HE-AAC. Awesome!

Then, at work, I tried this same on Windows, and the stream wouldn't play.

I then opened iTunes 9 on a different Mac and stream is no longer listed! What happened?

September 11, 2009 2:56 PM  
Anonymous Rusty Hodge said...

We redirected the 48kb aac feed to the 128k MP3 because of capacity issues; and I think that caused apple to pull the listing.

We're working with Apple to get all our streams back in the listings.

September 13, 2009 8:34 PM  

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home