The MPEG-4 High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) proposal has been elevated to the final ballot stage, which will, hopefully, soon lead to a standard. The new encoding profile enhances the current AAC LC (Low Complexity) standard with the Spectral Bandwidth Replication (SBR). The group calls SBR "one of the most remarkable advancements in audio compression in many years". Thanks to coding options, decoders not equiped with SBR decoding functionalities can still play the AAC streams.
One of the upcoming software solutions on Windows-platform is the Nero Digital -codec, which was announced at CeBit last week.
Source:
JVT press release
Source:
JVT press release
