CoreAAC Professional v2.0 Audio Decoder Released!

Note: Tested…Windows 7 users should not waste their money.

On XP and Vista I was a big fan of CoreAVC; however, I have been disappointed by CoreAVC 2.0 so I am not expecting much from CoreAAC 2.0 myself.  But for those using a DirectShow based player without Media Foundation support CoreAAC may offer some benefits over the native DirectShow AAC decoder.

Both the native Media Foundation and DirectShow AAC decoder decodes the following Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) profiles:

– MPEG-2 AAC Low Complexity (LC) profile (multichannel).

– MPEG-4 HE-AAC v1 (multichannel) with AAC-LC core.

– MPEG-4 HE-AAC v2 (stereo) with AAC-LC core.

It also supports the below audio subtypes:

– MFAudioFormat_AAC (Raw AAC or ADTS AAC)

– MEDIASUBTYPE_RAW_AAC1 (Raw AAC)

The CoreACC decoder supports all of the above.  What is unclear is exactly what you gain from CoreAAC, at least from the release notes.  They mention aacPlus and eAAC+; however; aacPlus v2 and eAAC+ are common trade names that refer to HE-AAC v2 so what do you gain?

Existing CoreAVC 2.0 owners can purchase CoreAAC 2.0 at a discounted price until August 1st so I’ll most likely be purchasing and reviewing it but I’m not expected much.

 

CoreAAC Professional v2.0 is a full-featured Microsoft® DirectShow™ software plug-in for Windows Media Player for Microsoft® Windows® 7/Vista/XP/2000. It is capable of playing AAC, HE-AACv1, HE-AACv2, aacPlus, eAAC+ mono, stereo, and surround audio files and streams.

FEATURES
– Supports Windows 32/64bit
– Supports Windows Media Player in Windows® 7/Vista/XP/2000
– AAC, HE-AACv1, HE-AACv2, aacPlus, eAAC+ support
– Multi-Channel support
– ARM NEON Support (SDK only)
– The most feature-rich and efficient AAC decoder in the industry