
The codec was originally part of Nero Digital, but was later released as a stand-alone package.

It was developed and distributed by Nero AG, and is available at no cost for Windows and Linux for non-commercial use.
WHO OWNS AAC WHO OWNS ADVANCED AUDIO CODEC PORTABLE
In 2006, Chip Magazine (Germany) found that AAC files encoded with the Nero AAC encoder would consume as little as half of the space on a portable music player when compared to MP3 files of similar audio quality. Nero's AAC encoder has been very competitive when tested against other encoders in scientific listening tests, for a time, second only to Apple's AAC encoder.
