I dont know if this means much to you, but previously only AAC LC was accepted. This is great news as AAC HE offers fantastic quality at very low bit rates, 48kb and below actually sound okay. This is great for those of us who want to save our precious memory stick space. Of course you can also still use AAC LC if you so wished, this still gives great quality audio and medium bit rates 96kb and up. The AAC codec is fantastic and gives us many options depending on your needs.
Some more great news, Nero released their AAC endocer in a free CLI (command
line interface) package and this works well with MeGUI. So now we can convert
our audio simply and maybe more importantly, for free! double yay i feel. Ok,
enough jazzing about, lets get onto the process.
We can either use the audio direct from our avisynth script or a direct file,
see avs script example below:
DirectShowSource("C:\Test video.avi",fps=23.97,audio=true)
The audio=true part at the end basically now means we can convert our audio and
video from the one script. This makes life very simple and probably could open
up the MeGUI one click encode options if you wanted to look into that. For now
though, it just means audio converting is all done in the same script as video,
very sweet. Open up the avs clip to make sure audio is working ok, if it is,
your ready to play. Onto the next steps...
Here you can see my script being used in both. As the smart kids out there might
have noticed, ive renamed my mp4 output files to correspond to the Audio and
Video file. If you leave them as default, the audio mp4 will over ride your
video mp4 as they would use the same name... Also smart to rename before
encoding as you will be kicking kittens if you do as i did and overwrite a 3
hour video encode with the audio file... Make sure you select ND AAC in the
audio codec drop down, the download can be found on the front page, make sure
program paths are also set to the Nero Digital EXE file.
Now, you can either use the PSP audio profile I have included on the main page,
or you can of course mess about with the settings yourself. The PSP accepts AAC
in LC, HE and also HE+PS which is HE and parametric stereo which is great on
very low bit rate stuff (48kbs).
There is my screenshot for low bit rate encodes. Hit ok and then the enqueue
button and then into the queue tab and start. One you have your mp4 file, test it
out to see if it sounds ok, then use the MeGUI Mp4 muxer to combine it with your
video file! Very simple. I personally always use adaptive bit rate in my
encodes, you can use whatever your needs dictate.