Convert AAC audio to AC3

[BigPhil1]

Hi guys,

I'm trying to convert AAC audio to AC3 using the eac3to command line & the Nero AAC decoder. Unfortunately I haven't had any success as I gather Nero 7 needs to be installed for this to work & I'm not sure where I can find this with it being such an old version. Would anyone know if I can just download some additional files from somewhere to achieve this rather than do a complete install of Nero, or alternatively perhaps recommend an alternative decoder for use with the command line.

Cheers

[johns0]

Install audacity with the ffmpeg-win-2.2.2 plugin and open the the aac file with audacity and export as ac3.

[bat999]

... for use with the command line.

FFmpeg

[RappinRod]

Pazera-Free-Audio-Extractor<<Thats what you want to use,,simple,easy and works every time for what you want to do...~

[BigPhil1]

Thanks very much for the help guys, I've successfully managed to convert AAC to AC3. The resulting AC3 file is 192 kbps, do you think there's any point in trying to increase this for better quality or should I just leave as is?

Thanks again

[newpball]

The resulting AC3 file is 192 kbps....

AC3 is a crappy compression to begin with.

How many channels do you have?

If it is 5.1 you got yourself utter crap, if it is 2.0 you have a bare minimum.

[Cornucopia]

@newpball, you should revise that to "AC3 is older, less efficient". Not by any means "crappy" unless you use too low of a bitrate. And AS USUAL, which bitrate is too low depends on the content. I've heard plenty of 192kbps that are crappy and I've heard plenty of 192kbps that are excellent, and all in-between. More grays in the world than pure blacks & whites.

***************

One must remember that you are re-encoding lossy from lossy, and using a different algorithm to boot. This makes the result much more "fragile", so it makes more sense to raise the bitrate to partially counteract that additional loss. Go back & try again.

Scott