Seeking audio encoding upgrade tips

[vhelp]

Hello everyone

While analog cable tv is still available, I am capturing away at tons of stuff using my Pinnacle Studio AV/DV capture card. Some of you already know this. Anyway. Using the card, I capture as DV (with cedocida) and been mostly satisifed on account of its greater hdd space saving bonus. Huffy and Lagarith are too large for my needs, though they do have their place in the lossless land. So while I continue to analog capture, my neglected audio needs attention. I used to do most of my conversions to mpeg-2, but naw-a-days since I'm mostly working with h264 encodes I am at a crosspoint, sort of.

I am looking for a better alternative to audio processing for h264. As I understand it, the current standards floating around is h264+AAC. So I've been encoding audio as AAC.

Here's how I go about the Audio step. I usually do this after I've setup and encoded the video via x264 cli

1. I use virtualdub to open my videos. The origin may come from either the .avi or .avs script. It all depends on which step I jumped into first. After opening the video file and setting up within the time line, I proceed to save to a wav file that section matching that of the h264 encoded video.
2. After creating the wav file, I run HeadAC3he and import the wav file.
3. I set for AAC format and 48k. The rest of the settings are seemed to be in the defaults and I encode to aac.
4. I'm not sure I am using the best setup for the encoding part in this step. I've just been encoding to aac as-is.

By now, I am also looking for a new alternative *optimum* approach, in terms of audio sound quality, from the hopefully improved conversion tips I might receive from you guys. So, I'm looking for several things:

1) is my current metho flaud or could use improvements with current tool I'm using ?
2) what method(s) do the current masses use for WAV -> AAC ?
3) or, should I be using another audio format instead of AAC ? if so, then what are the howto steps ?
4) what command line tools can I use for this. Since I develope gui front-ends, this would be my route.
5) and, obtaining the highest quality encode is the obvious goal here.

Thank you in advance,
-vhelp 4991

[INFRATOM]

You must have lots of time and patience to do it like that, I would buy one of these
http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html
it records Hi def plus dolby 5.1 through digital also. Amazon sells it for $208, If I was sure it would work on a 64bit OS I would buy one.

[vhelp]

[UPDATE] -- on audio improvements / tips / technique

Audio Improvement # 1

Ok. I found an even better solution for WAV->AAC via command line method:

--> ffmpeg -i audio.wav -acodec libfaac -ar 48000 -ac 2 -y audio.aac

1. This processed 14,984kb -> 626kb size audio file. According to mediainfo: 48k, 2ch, 16bit
2. quality was very good to my ears.
3. although, I could not adjust the bitrate, like: -ab 128 or -ab 384 etc., etc.
4. out the window goes headac3, at least for wav2aac encoding.
6. ffmpeg version used in this demo: rev9767

Other than the above encoding method, I see no options to fine-tune the encoding and/or quality aspects.

demo aac audio, below.

file: irobot.aac

-vhelp 5006