AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)

AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is a lossy audio codec standardised by MPEG as part of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, and designed to succeed MP3. At the same bitrate it generally sounds better than MP3. It is the standard audio codec in MP4 videos and is widely used by Apple, YouTube and digital broadcasting. A .aac file is a raw AAC stream, while .m4a wraps the same audio in an MPEG-4 container.

Use AAC for music, podcasts and audio tracks where you want good quality in small files, especially for Apple devices, smartphones and streaming. If a file must play on very old hardware, MP3 is more universal; for archiving, keep a lossless copy.

Source formats: .aac