AAC and Mp3 players
 

I'm considering ripping all my CDs onto AAC format, and since I haven't bought an MP3 player yet, I want to know what do MP3 players look like in playing AAC. Do the majority of them do it, or just a few?

iPods play AAC I think.

ipods do play aac in mp4 containers.

not sure about mp2 containers.

iPods play LC-AAC (no HE-AAC/aacPlus), some phones play LC and HE.

And yes it has to be in mp4 containers (with extension .m4a).

Of the players I have, the iriver U10/Clix does not support it, but the Sony Ericsson W810 ("Walkman phone") does support it.

I switched to recording all of my CDs in flac. Then I re-encode them to whatever.....

Lossless is hard to beat for a source. Another advantage is that low bitrate MP3s sound better being encoded from lossless to their MP3 target bitrates. For example, 64kbps MP3s, made from flac source, sound a whole lot better than 128k re-encodes.

Try lossless, you'll like it.

I'd use lossless, but quite frankly APS MP3 and Vorbis Q5 are above the level that I can actually hear, and fit fine onto my portable, so it's something of a moot point. My lossless copies are on the CDs.

I can see a good argument for FLAC though. Definitely a good idea if you're concerned about archiving the audio.