Hector Martin

This is what happens when you transcode the same audio file 4 times with @ffmpeg AAC, vs. libfdk_aac, at 128kbps (the docs say it's better than libfdk_aac at that bitrate): https://mrcn.st/t/orig_ffmpeg_fdk_4x.wav … looping {1 bar lossless - 1 bar ffmpeg - 1 bar fdk}

Only now you mention that you are re-re-re-encoding the same file? Sorry, but that's a *very important* distinction. No wonder it sounds bad (generation loss). Now many who saw your "FFmpeg AAC sucks" tweets w/o knowing this fact are going to be needlessly afraid to use it.

Not that I'm claiming AAC>FDK, and yes, that claim you linked to should be substantiated or removed. But here I thought you were encoding the file once and couldn't figure out why both of your outputs (AAC vs FDK) were so crappy.

I am doing this **because when I previously tried to bring up single-generation issues to your devs, I was dismissed as "hearing things"**, and because I actually have a use case for this, and because even transcoding repeatedly I'd expect it to be okay at 320kbps.

This is my way of saying "look, here's *one* way of using the ffmpeg AAC encoder that shows it being quite inferior to libfdk_aac, and *anyone* can hear that, and I even have a valid use case for it, so please don't brush me off?" after being brushed off for subtler cases.

My *actual* "I noticed the ffmpeg aac encoder is bad again" use case that brought things up again, this time, was 256kbps MP3 -> 320kbps ffaac -> 320kbps ffaac, which is much gentler and I *expected* it to be transparent, but it wasn't. The second ffaac had quite noticeable loss.