HE-AAC

High Efficiency AAC (aka aacPlus), is a lossy data compression scheme for audio streams, and is part of the MPEG-4 Part 3 specification.

HE-AAC combines Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Spectral Band Replication (SBR) and, since version 2 (or Enhanced aacPlus), parametric stereo (PS). The codec can operate at very low bitrates and is good for internet radio streaming. A 48 kilobit-per-second stream is considered to have higher quality than 128 kbit/s MP3.

VLC supports HE-AAC through the FAAD2 library.

External links

• Tuner2.com list of Internet radio stations using aacPlus
• aacPlus explained
• Open Source AAC codec FAAC (encoder) and FAAD2 (decoder)