AAC and MP3 File Format

AAC is the default audio format of Apple's iPhone, iPod and iTunes. Most of the music in iTunes Store is in AAC format. Sony PSP also adopts AAC as its audio standard format. However, AAC is not supported by all media players. If your media player is not compatible with AAC, especially the DRM protected AAC audio, you have to convert the AAC files to MP3 or WMA, or other unprotected audio formats that can playback on your audio player.

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC audio generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at many bit-rates. AAC audio is best known use is as the default audio format of Apple's iPhone, iPod, iTunes, and the format used for all iTunes Store audio. Sony's Play Station also adopts AAC audio as its audio and MPEG-4 video standard format.

AAC audio format allows developers more flexibility to design codecs than MP3 does. However in terms of whether AAC audio is better than MP3 audio, the advantages of AAC audio are not entirely decisive, and the MP3 audio specification, while outdated, has proven surprisingly robust in spite of considerable flaws. AAC audio and HE-AAC audio are universally accepted as better than MP3 audio at low bitrates.

An MP3 file is made up of multiple MP3 frames, which consist of the MP3 header and the MP3 data. This sequence of frames is called an Elementary stream. The MP3 data is the actual audio payload. The diagram shows that the MP3 header consists of a sync word, which is used to identify the beginning of a valid frame. This is followed by a bit indicating that this is the MPEG standard and two bits that indicate that layer 3 is used; hence MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 or MP3. Most MP3 files today contain ID3 metadata, which precedes or follows the MP3 frames; this is also shown in the diagram.

Convert iTunes Protected AAC to MP3

NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter is an excellent audio conversion tool that can help you transcode AAC format to MP3, WMA and WAV formats. Working with iTunes, NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter can convert AAC to MP3, AAC to WMA and AAC to WAV.

NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter is able to convert iTunes M4P and M4A to WAV and unprotected WMA formats.

Utilizing virtual burning technology, NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter can also convert any DRM protected WMA, M4P music and M4B, MP3, rax, MP4, WAV, RA, snd, OGG, AIF music to unprotected MP3, WAV, WMA formats at fast speed and high quality.

NoteBurner AAC to MP3 converter allows the owner of protected audio files such as those purchased from Apples' iTunes to remove the DRM protection from the files and convert the files into audio formats such as MP3, WMA, WAV or AAC.

NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter installs a virtual CD-RW, it helps you burn any unprotected or DRM protected M4P, M4A, WMA music files onto the virtual CD, rips tracks on the virtual CD, encodes tracks onto MP3, WAV or WMA music files. It can repeat this audio converting procedure until your whole music collection is done.

NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter also helps make new media ready for inclusion in your media library. The title, artist and album name for every file are automatically stored in ID3 tags. NoteBurner makes sure that, after the re-recording process is over, the new files also have all existing tag information. NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter supports ID3-tag formats like ID3v1 and ID3v2. Normalization inside NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter ensures media is converted at the uniform volume level of the entire media collection.