These days everyone is satisfied with the high-quality music streaming services like Spotify. But there are some of us who still keep a big collection of offline music. In addition, some people are into the business of producing podcasts, audio books and more. If you also have to create audio files from various sources, then you would want the best quality for your audio files.
With the help of an open-source application called QAAC, we can generate very high quality M4A files. QAAC stands for QuickTime AAC Encoder. As anyone can guess this tool depends on QuickTime being installed on your PC. You can download and install the latest version of QuickTime from https://www.apple.com/itunes/download/win64.
During the installation of QuickTime, choose to install everything on your Windows PC. After you have installed QuickTime on your PC (with all the components), you can download QAAC package from https://github.com/nu774/qaac. The downloaded file contains binaries for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
Now you can run a check if QAAC has all the required files. For a quick check, you can give the command qaac –check. It should not report any missing files, unsupported versions or errors. For proper installation, it should report the versions of the some of the required DLL files and quit.
For very basic encoding, you can simply give the qaac command followed by the input audio file. For example, if you want to encode an audio file called track.mp3, then you can give the command qaac track.mp3. It will automatically choose the best parameters for the encoding and produce M4A audio file with the same name.
You can also specify the output file name by using the -o parameter. For example qaac track.mp3 -o track.m4a. QAAC has many more features and we can see all the features that it offers by simply running qaac.exe without any parameters.