Best Practices – Digital Asset Guidelines – Rev 4 www.autocare.org | www.autocarevip.com | technology@autocare.org 23 • Adobe Flash can play both stand-alone MP3 files and MP3 audio streams within an MP4 video container. AAC • Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. • AAC was standardized in 1997, was chosen by Apple as their default format for the iTunes Store. • AAC was designed to provide better sound quality than MP3 at the same bitrate, and it can encode audio at any bitrate. (MP3 is limited to a fixed number of bitrates, with an upper bound of 320 kbps) • AAC can encode up to 48 channels of sound. • The quality for stereo is satisfactory to modest requirements at 96 kbit/s in joint stereo mode. • It is supported on Nokia, Android, BlackBerry, and webOS-based mobile phones. • The AAC format is patent-encumbered licensing rates are available online. • The AAC format is designed to be playable in real-time on devices with limited CPU power. • All current Apple products, including iPods, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, and QuickTime support certain profiles of AAC in stand-alone audio files and in audio streams in an MP4 video container. • Adobe Flash supports all profiles of AAC in MP4, as do the open source MPlayer and VLC video players. Vorbis • Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. • Vorbis project produces an audio format specification and software implementation (codec) for lossy audio compression. • Vorbis is most commonly used in conjunction with the Ogg container format, this is why it is often referred to as Ogg Vorbis. • Vorbis is not encumbered by any known patents and is therefore supported out-of- the-box by all major Linux distributions. • Mozilla Firefox 3.5 supports Vorbis audio files in an Ogg container. (or Ogg videos with a Vorbis audio track) • Android mobile phones can also play stand-alone Vorbis audio files.