Still no AAC support?

WaveLab
1

Hey PG,

WL8 looks really promising to me but I checked out the presentation at the Musikmesse the version shown there still had no AAC export functionality (don’t know about import). Is this going to change for the final version?

Thanks!
Klaus

2

There is no AAC encoding, unfortunatly. I hope this will change in the future, but not for 8.0.x

3

That’s a bummer. Thanks for the reply, PG!

4

Well considering 63% of last quarters music sales in the US were via iTunes, and iTunes most common format is AAC I would say Wavelab is embarrassingly behind the industry here. And I’m not making these numbers up for drama. These are the numbers from the NPD as posted in an article this week here:

I think the lack of AAC support is a big omission and my goodness, if the response is “maybe in WL 9” I’ll be very disappointed. We simply should not have to wait 2 more years for one of the most important file formats to be supported in our mastering app!

5

Well, no need for disappointment yet, since that wasn’t said. “Not for 8.0.x” is the correct quote.

6

Let’s put it in an other perspective.
MFiT is ‘slowely’ moving to be the standard now and apple made some tools to check wether a file will be clipping/ISP’s after encoding to AAC. These tools are only avaialble for MAC (a big miss from apple if you ask me) and so it would be more then welcomed by a lot of mastering-engineers if it has AAC support and even better, something like the MFiT tools? Sure you can play it on the ‘save side’ and aim for -1db, but that would still be guessing and no guarantee that there is no actual clipping.
I know for sure that it would bring sales of WL8 up a LOT since a lot of ME’s are working on PC anyway.

7

Since there are some sonnox pluginns included, maye something like a stripped down version of this?
http://www.sonnoxplugins.com/pub/plugins/products/pro-codec.htm
I would happily pay extra for that!

8

Hello,

we are aware of the need of AAC compatibility. As Philippe mentioned, it hasn’t made
it into 8.0, but we clearly see the necessity and have it on the list.

Thanks,
Timo

9

Thanks for the info Timo.
I’ll look forward to having AAC supported by Wavelab and am glad you responded here!

10

Nice! Thanks for the info, Timo!