CDex Configuration for Encoding with Nero AAC Codec 5

Posted by Seon on March 18, 2008

Until recently I’ve been ripping my CD collection to MP3 files. But I recently discovered that Nero opened their reference quality implementation MPEG-4 (or AAC) audio codec to the public (last year!). This is great because the AAC format actually compresses quite nicely and sounds great too. In my opinion Nero’s AAC audio codec produces music files that rival or exceed most (all?) open-source AAC codecs.

I couldn’t find any guides for configuring CDex to rip and tag into the AAC format so I’ve copied down the steps I used. Hope this helps others looking to get started with AACs and the CDex audio ripper.

    CDex + AAC + MusicBrainz = .w4a Goodness

  1. Extract Nero AAC to New Folder

    Download the AAC codec and extract all the files. Copy all the files inside win32 into the new folder C:nero_aac.

  2. Create New Batch File

    Download encode.bat movie it to C:nero_aacencode.bat. CDex will invoke encode.bat which in turn will execute the AAC encoder and the AAC tagger.

    Here are the two commands inside encode.bat:

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    c:nero_aacneroAacEnc_SSE.exe -q 0.8 -if %1 -of %2
c:nero_aacneroAacTag.exe %2 -meta:artist=%3 -meta:album=%4 -meta:track=%5 -meta:totaltracks=%6 -meta:title=%7 -meta:genre=%8 -meta:year=%9

    The first line executes an SSE optimized(?) encoder. This should be safe for most of us, but you can substitute it with neroAacEnc.exe. The parameter -q sets the VBR quality. I’ve set it to 0.8 but it can be a floating number from 0.0 up to 1.0 (max. bit rate and larger file size) I could not tell the difference between 0.5 and 1.0 during some informal testing. The second line performs the metadata tagging.

    To get a list of the various metadata tags that are available, execute the tagger with the option -list-standard-meta.

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    c:nero_aacneroAacTag.exe -list-standard-meta

List of standard Nero Digital metadata field names:
    title  artist  year  album  genre  track  totaltracks  disc  totaldiscs  url  copyright  comment  lyrics  credits  rating  label  composer  isrc  mood  tempo

End of metadata field name list.
  3. Start CDex and press F4 for options.
    CDex Encoder Options
      Click on the Encoder tab and set the following options.

    • Encoder -> External Encoder
    • Encoder Path -> C:nero_aacencode.bat
    • Parameter string -> %1 %2 "%a" "%b" "%tn" "%tt" "%t" "%g" "%y"
    • File Extension -> m4a
    • On-the-fly Encoding -> unchecked
    • Send WAV header to stdin -> unchecked
    CDex Generic Options
      Click on the Generic tab and disable ID3 tagging.

    • ID3 Tag Version -> None


  4. Rip your MP3s as usual and you should find fresh hot m4a files waiting in your target folder. Winamp can play these without a problem. Coincidentally, I use the m4a extension versus the mp4 extension in order to allow iTunes and iPods to read the same files with minimal hassle.
  5. CDex Configuration Profiles

    (optional) Save these new settings to a profile named aac. I also keep separate profiles for mp3s and flacs.

  6. (optional) Post process each set of m4a’s using MusicBrainz PicardTagger to scrub the metadata. I prefer to lookup CD information using MusicBrainz, and fall back to using freedb2.org as a backup. PicardTagger makes it a cinch to remove and cleanup weird capitalizations and characters in the song filename and attributes.

    MusicBrainz creates and assigns a unique PUID to every song. A PUID is a digital fingerprint created through analyzing the audio properties of the song itself; every song has it’s own unique fingerprint. PUIDs can be used to identify a song correctly, even if the filename and ID3 information is missing or incorrect.

Cheers!

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