Support for xHE-AAC aka USAC

[Lotesdelere]

AFAIK xHE-AAC aka USAC is mandatory in Android since Pie. And in fact it does play fine with the built-in Android player, but it doesn't play with VLC.

It woud be nice to have xHE-ACC/USAC playback available in VLC

Sample files:
http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=868 ... 7714511385

[degarb]

YES! I think this needs to be at the top of the vlc to do list. It is 2 years, since this person requested.

I would think that since Exhale, FDK, Foobar2000, are all open source, VLC could simply grab the foobar fdk.dll and be up and running, playing xHE-AAC within an hour by someone who knows what ever computer language VLC uses. I do not , and most users are not programmers.

Compelling reasons I have found, are articulated below:

I have hundreds of hours of speech. I chose Exhale xHE-AAC over Opus, because the highs are better and Opus has an annoying artifact (grain in the high peaks, which sounds like a static noise profile that was removed), which is impossible to remove using any opus setting, and is audible on nearly every device I play it on. I found it reminiscent to me of someone with a chest rattle. Exhale just sounds cleaner. Only on one device did Exhale sound a hint like the player was in the bottom of a metal garbage can, which if preferred by me to the chest rattle.

Also, when I serve these audio files via webserver, the xHE-AAC play from the Chrome and Firefox browser on android, allowing a preview. The Opus require downloading the entire files which are typically 10 to 40 hours, which is 120 megs at 20 to 24 kps. So, no preview is possbile with opus.

I am using foobar with the fdk plugin, but I find it annoying that vlc doesn't support the best audio codec that is now the standard of 3 out 4 of the big operating systems. Even windows 11 media player plays xHE-AAC. But, on the windows 10 machine, when I am using foobar2000 for conversion, I don't think it is possible to play audio. At any rate, vlc is my default player, and I can't simply click files to play, and must open up my launcher, launch foobar, then drag and drop my audio files to play, and it doesn't even show the attached art or have any interesting visualizations. Plus it can't remember my place in a 40 hour audio book when the power goes out.

[degarb]

To clarify, foobar2000 plus the fdkaac plugin, is the only option I could find for playing xHE-AAC on windows 10, which has the downside that I laid out. On windows 11, windows media player will play the files, but it always comically starts playing the file at 2x speed and I must switch to 1.5 speed, then back to 1x. On android, playback is flawless and built in.

My reading of the Opus patent pool, is that andoid and apple built in playback of opus will end. And the opus user will need to jump through hoops in the future to play their opus files. It is incredibly difficult to find any audio book player on any OS, since most players are designed for music, which makes them unsuitable to play audiobooks ripped from cds or continuous 10 to 130 hour single files. Good luck spidering through directories in the right order, or playback without losing your place once the player crashes, battery dies, or you pause and come back weeks later to the same place in the book after several reboots.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

If it really took only one hour to support this, why did you not contract some expert to work that hour?

My guess is that it would take several weeks if not months to somebody who knows AAC.