DISCLAIMER: All the information contained in this page, or any linked from it, is provided as is, having no warranty or support of any kind, and is used entirely at your own risk.  Audio Codecs Collection
This page contains a collection of 7 Audio codecs, that in the majority of cases, I have experience using in conjunction with video tools such as mencoder/mplayer and transcode running under Linux or OSX. Its primarily intended for advanced users who are happy building from source code, and working outside of the GUI world. If this is not you, then this page is not really for you, as its 100% command line, and most need to be built from source. Currently included here are all the Audio codecs that I am aware of, that worked for me under OSX or Linux, but if you know of any others that should find a home in this collection, please let me know. Just be sure that what ever you submit is; working, not Windoze specific and not payware (without a demo, or free version), other than that anything legal goes.
FAAD2FAAD2 is a very complete MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 AAC decoder library, in the current version it supports the Main, LC, LTP, LD and ER AAC profiles. The easy to use library interface gives the user a simple and powerful way to access AAC files in any program. Unique about FAAD2 is the fact that it is licensed under the GNU General Public License, although paying of patent royalties may be needed before using it. For commercial usage other licensing terms than the GPL can be negotiated. [more] FLACFLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player just like you would an MP3 file. FLAC is freely available and supported on most operating systems, including Windows, "UNIX" (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, OS X, IRIX), BeOS, OS/2, and Amiga. For OSX there is a binary package complete with GUI front end, which is available from here [more] LameLAME is an LGPL MP3 encoder. The Open source development model allowed to improve its quality and speed since 1999. It is now an highly evolved MP3 encoder, with quality and speed able to rival state of the art commercial encoders. [more] Liba52liba52 is a free library for decoding ATSC A/52 streams. It is released under the terms of the GPL license. The A/52 standard is used in a variety of applications, including digital television and DVD. It is also known as AC-3. [more] MADMAD is a high-quality MPEG audio decoder. It currently supports MPEG-1 and the MPEG-2 extension to lower sampling frequencies, as well as the de facto MPEG 2.5 format. All three audio layers Layer I, Layer II, and Layer III (i.e. MP3) are fully implemented. MAD does not yet support MPEG-2 multichannel audio (although it should be backward compatible with such streams) nor does it currently support AAC. [more] OggVorbisOgg Vorbis is a new audio compression format. It is roughly comparable to other formats used to store and play digital music, such as MP3, VQF, AAC, and other digital audio formats. It is different from these other formats because it is completely free, open, and unpatented. This is now my preferred codec for digital audio and has now all but replaced my use of mp3, outside of the video world. [more] SpeexSpeex is an Open Source/Free Software patent-free audio compression format designed for speech. The Speex Project aims to lower the barrier of entry for voice applications by providing a free alternative to expensive proprietary speech codecs. Moreover, Speex is well-adapted to Internet applications and provides useful features that are not present in most other codecs. Finally, Speex is part of the GNU Project and is available under the Xiph.org variant of the BSD license. Needs libogg (from oggvorbis) installed to build the encoder/decoder binaries. Without this, it will just build the library, which may actually be enough for some applications. [more]
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