My 3g iPod is near death and I'm looking to replace it (as it's out of warranty). I do like the style of the iPod quite a bit but it's no where near as functional as it's competitors, as others seem to give you a lot more bang for your buck. However, my upgrade path is restricted to the iPod as 3/4 of my music collection is in AAC, a lot of which has been purchased of allofmp3 and/or iTMS (with DRM removed by Hymn). Can someone tell me why on earth is the AAC format exclusive to the iPod? And if it's not exclusive, can someone tell me who else makes portable music devices that DO support AAC? Short of repurchasing all of the online music in another format, I'm kind of stuck here (transcoding is not an option for me as the quality loss would annoy me too much).

Thanks guys.

Its simple. Apple wants you to get an iPod and they make heaps of money from it. They are locking you into a lifetime of buy their products. And although its a nightmare for you, Apple Shareholders would be celebrating with all the cash driven by iPod sales. Some people say they don't have a choice, well you should have known before getting an iPod or starting using iTunes.

You can however just stuff the iPod and get a MP3 player of your choice Just burn all ur AAC's into an MP3 DVD or CD, and rip it again. Pain the in arse, but if you really want another player, you gotta do it.

Thanks for your reply, but..

How is this Apple's fault? Apple have embraced the format (rightly so) but Apple don't hold the patent for the format or have any control over it's licensing, so any company ought to be able to obtain a licence and support it.

As for your suggestion regarding burning all my music onto MP3 CD/DVD, why do that when you can just transcode, as the end result will still be the same. Anyway, transcoding is not really an acceptable option for me as stated in my original post, so I may just need to go through the labourous and expensive task of repurchasing all my music and/or re-ripping my music. Bah.

Many devices support AAC. Several new car stereos support it and nearly all PalmOS 5 devices support RealAudio 10 AAC.

This is exactly why even after buying my 3G I never moved on from mp3. I had this problem before my iPod with a Network Walkman from Sony, which used ATRAC. I had converted all of my existing mp3s into ATRAC files but my NW began to give me fits and I ended up ditching it. I had to re-rip every CD I had.

The only time I get AAC files is off IMS but even then I transcode to mp3. Quality-loss be damned (I can't even tell anyway).

Neither are portable media players though. You might argue the PalmOS 5 counts as a portable media player since it, well, portable, but it doesn't have the storage capacity to act as an effective media player (vs say the iPod).

Sorry I didn't read the last bit about the Transcoding

AAC itself isn't proprietary, and many devices and music players can support it, but they can't open the AAC files you downloaded from the iTunes music Store. That's cause Apple encodes the AAC files with their FairPlay DRM system to protect files being illegal distributed. Right now, Apple isn't licensing FairPlay, so thats why some devices do support AAC, they don't support the files you bought from the iTunes Music Store. Only Apple products, iTunes, iPod, QuickTime, can access the Fair Play encryted files.

EDIT: I reread you question, and just realized you are asking something a little different. The reason why I think less DAP support AAC files is because for the people who owned them, they are gonna be mostly be encrypted with FairPlay, and Apple isn't licensing it. Still thou, I think there are a few DAps out there that support AAC. (wasn't there an iRiver which supported it ?) Its slowly being adopted as well. But it will take ages before it even gets close to the support that WMA has. If Apple started licensing FairPlay, it would a totally different story. Right now there is barley any demand.

Some devices that supports AAC

Quick Search and what I found was mostly musicphones
- Samsung SGH-i300 musicphone
- Samsung Series 60 smartphone
- Sendo X2
- Neuros 3 PocketPlayer (MP3 Player)
- LG M4300 musicphone
- Sony Ericsson Z800i
- Most new Motorola musicphones seem to have it too.

Care to give me a model number?

Yes me too!

My good ole' N-Gage reads AAC. I just have to deDRM them, then use the M4A to AAC thing in dMC. It can't read MPEG-4 AAC (AAC in MPEG-4 container, actually), but MPEG-2 AAC (pure AAC file). I do this once in a while and it works beautifully. A lot better than transcoding.

Better than nothing, thanks a lot!

The reason that most companies don't use it is because of licensing costs vs sales. For the amount of people that are going to buy their mp3 player because it supports AAC, it isn't worth licensing it, especially when you have something like Ogg Vorbis which has almost identicle sound quality, but for free.

http://www.crutchfield.com/S-3yfdc0fAC8k/c...est=&search=AAC
this should help.

You may be right, but then that is exactly why I'll probably never buy anything other than an ipod.

If you are after sound quality, then look no further than OGG, and if it is because of iTunes, well, even if it did support it, Apple isn't licensing its DRM so there is no point in that either.