An aac file extension is associated with the Advanced audio coding file format (AAC) that provides audio encoding with better sound quality and compression ratio than older formats, such as mp3 or ogg.

Detailed description

Software that open aac file

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AAC file extension - Advanced audio coding stream file

What is aac file? How to open aac files?

File type specification:

Audio and sound file type icon Audio and sound file type

Mobile ringtone file type icon Mobile ringtone file type

aac file icon: aac filetype icon

Files with aac extension are mostly sound files encoded by Advanced Audio Codec. AAC is a lossy digital audio compression format. Because of its exceptional performance and quality, AAC is at the core of the MPEG-4, 3GPP and 3GPP2 specifications and is the audio codec of choice for Internet, wireless and digital broadcast arenas.

AAC was designed as an improved-performance codec relative to MP3 (which was specified in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2) by the ISO/IEC in 11172-3 and 13818-3.

AAC provides audio encoding that compresses much more efficiently than older formats, such as MP3 or OGG, yet delivers quality rivaling that of uncompressed CD audio.

Features of AAC format
AAC was promoted as the successor to MP3 for audio coding at medium to high bitrates. When compared side-by-side, AAC proves itself worthy of replacing MP3 as the new Internet audio standard the advantages over MP3 are:

  • Improved compression provides higher-quality results with smaller file sizes.
  • Support for multichannel audio, providing up to 48 full frequency channels.
  • Higher resolution audio, yielding sampling rates up to 96 kHz.
  • Improved decoding efficiency, requiring less processing power for decode.

History of AAC

Advanced Audio Coding was developed with the cooperation and contributions of companies mainly including Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony and Nokia, and was officially declared an international standard by the Moving Pictures Experts Group in April of 1997.

AAC was written into specification as Part 7 of the MPEG-2 standard, and again into Part 3 of the MPEG-4 standard. As such, AAC can be referred to as MPEG-2 Part 7 and MPEG-4 Part 3 depending on its implementation, but is most often referred to as MPEG-4 AAC, or AAC for short.

However, MP4 usually refers to the format described in MPEG-4 Part 14, which is a container format for carriage of video and audio data.

Updated: December 6, 2023

The default software associated to open aac file:

Media Player icon

Microsoft Corporation logoMedia Player  Microsoft Windows software

Company or developer:
Microsoft Corporation

Windows 11 default media player is called Media Player. Microsoft developed it for the latest Windows 11 operating system (OS). Media Player replaces the old Windows Media Player, Windows 10 Groove Music, and Microsoft Movies & TV. It was released to all Win11 users on February 15, 2022.

VLC media player icon

VideoLAN Project Team logoVLC media player  Microsoft Windows software

Company or developer:
VideoLAN Project Team

Very popular multimedia player developed for Windows, Apple Mac, Linux, Unix and various other operating systems and platforms.

VLC can playback many of the video formats (AVI, MKV, OGV, WMV, ASF, MOV...) and audio formats (MP3, AAC, M4A, OGG, FLAC...) as well as support of subtitles for video. It can also be used as a streaming server and multimedia transcoder.

Apple iTunes for Mac icon

Apple, Inc. logoApple iTunes for Mac  Apple macOS / Mac OS X software

Company or developer:
Apple, Inc.

Apple iTunes is multimedia application distributed with Apple macOS operating system. It organizes and plays digital music and videos. iTunes is also used to manage Apple's portable devices, such as iPod, iPhone and iPad.

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Convert Flac to AAC on Mac

How to burn audio CD in iTunes

Help how to open:

Use any compatible audio player, such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, VLC Media Player to playback .aac audio files.

How to convert:

Use any audio conversion tool or transcoder listed in associated applications.

Find conversions from aac file:

aac to cda

aac to mov

aac to mp3

aac to mp4

aac to text

aac to txt

aac to wav

Find converter to aac file type:

aiff to aac

cda to aac

flac to aac

m3u8 to aac

midi to aac

mp3 to aac

opus to aac

List of software applications associated to the .aac file extension

Recommended software programs are sorted by OS platform (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android etc.)
and possible program actions that can be done with the file: like open aac file, edit aac file, convert aac file, view aac file, play aac file etc. (if exist software for corresponding action in File-Extensions.org's database).

Hint:
Click on the tab below to simply browse between the application actions, to quickly get a list of recommended software, which is able to perform the specified software action, such as opening, editing or converting aac files.

Software that open aac file - Advanced audio coding stream file

Programs supporting the exension aac on the main platforms Windows, Mac, Linux or mobile. Click on the link to get more information about listed programs for open aac file action.

Apple macOS / Mac OS X:

Linux/Unix:

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