aac encoding or generally: what codec to take

[tbart]

Hello!

Being audioengineer, musician and the like I always strove for high quality ripping/encoding. lame --preset extreme for high end listening purposes on respective equipment (or FLAC of course for studio equipment) and --preset standard for desktop use were my standards until now.

but as my phone can do aac (and, hell, they sound good at only 1,5M...) and mp3 is rather old now I wondered what people use nowadays to do their encoding.
(FLAC would definitely be a choice but it's to big for the desktop and unnecessarily good for mobile listening - my phone couldn't play it anyway)

Strangely, I couldn't find aac/aac+/aac++ encoding tools in portage.

M4A? or MP4?

AAC++ would be nice, as it is the only newer format the phone could do and would be suitable for desktop, too, I guess.

(People suggesting WMA will be forced to install Vista - under my very personal surveillance.... Although: There's a pro to that: You can now even get your BSODs in 3D ;-> )

tia,
th

EDIT: just found FAAC; the package description should contain aac somewhere, one does not find a single encoder using "aac" at packages.gentoo.org

still, what do you think about the various options?

[Tlaloc]

The pro-audio overlay could be of interest to you.
http://proaudio.tuxfamily.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
I myself encode all my CDs in flac for a little while now and encode to other formats as needed (very easy with Amarok and the transkode script). Should I get a new player that understands only a certain format I don't need to rip anything again. Transkode exists also as a standalone kde app and uses faac for aac encoding.

Bye, Val.