Quote:
I'll drop this now. It's just a pet peeve of mine that so many people incorrectly associate AAC only with Apple.

I think it's a pretty fair association! AAC has been around for years but got nowhere as a consumer format until Apple adopted it. I recall Dolby at the 2000 MP3 summit trying to persuade me that we should put AAC on the empeg to benefit from superior audio performance at low bitrates. We didn't do so because nobody was using AAC then, outside of some fringe (mostly pro or self contained) applications.

Apple wanted to adopt a format without the piracy image of MP3, and of course they could not adopt a Microsoft format. AAC was the obvious choice. Even now, with millions of iPod users encoding in AAC (without realising it, probably), you could proably count on the fingers of one hand the number of other mainstream products that support it.

Rob