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Asked: 2026-05-24T18:36:56+00:00

I am having problems figuring out how to detect if an AAC audio source

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I am having problems figuring out how to detect if an AAC audio source is compatible with Android. The supported media formats page for android says ‘AAC LC/LTP’ when delivered as 3GP, MPEG4 or ADTS raw AAC. It appears the LC means ‘Low Complexity” and LTP means “Long Term Prediction” but, my biggest frustration is determining what AAC profiles/modules are supported on Android. When I run the input into ffmpeg, i see its AAC, but no extended information about the AAC. An example source is http://6693.live.streamtheworld.com:80/WTMJAMAAC_SC . Anyone have any ideas?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You can get extended media information programmatically using the MediaInfo library available here:
    http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en/Download

    The “DLL” or other media downloads include example code in C, C#, etc.
    If you do not want to write any code, the same website has downloads for “MediaInfo”, a program that uses the library to display information.

    Your Android supported media formats link says: “Mono/Stereo content in any combination of standard bit rates up to 160 kbps and sampling rates from 8 to 48kHz“. Notice the sample below shows all of those: Channel(s), Overall bit rate, and sampling rate.

    It may be necessary to test for yourself whether “up to 160 kbps” means “Up to 160 kbps overall” or “No part of the file, including those encoded with variable bit rates (VBR), may surpass 160kbps.”
    It is noteworthy that I have played movies on my single-core Android phone which have 256KBit VBR AAC 6-channel audio, though obviously I did not hear the rear surround channels. Because of those, I suspect that the limitations proposed in the link are minimums allowed by Google, but that the audio formats supported in practice are much more broad.

    Here is an example from an actual AAC file (using the MediaInfo program):

    Format                           : ADTS
Format/Info                      : Audio Data Transport Stream
File size                        : 176 KiB
Duration                         : 30s 707ms
Overall bit rate                 : 46.8 Kbps

Audio
Format                           : AAC
Format/Info                      : Advanced Audio Codec
Format version                   : Version 4
Format profile                   : LC
Format settings, SBR             : Yes
Format settings, PS              : Yes
Muxing mode                      : ADTS
Duration                         : 30s 707ms
Bit rate mode                    : Constant
Bit rate                         : 46.8 Kbps
Channel(s)                       : 2 channels
Sampling rate                    : 44.1 KHz
Stream size                      : 176 KiB (100%)

    I wrote a wrapper library in C# for MediaInfo. It isn’t necessary to use MediaInfo, but makes its use much easier and more “.NET-friendly”. It can be found here: MediaInfo.Net.

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