I have finally decided to abandon my committment to AAC. After many years of finding ways around problems (including writing MusicBridge) I have decided to switch to MP3. I was hanging on with hope that Vista would have native support for AAC, as this does not seem to be the case (although I hear that MS Zune will support AAC so who knows) and I cannot find anyway to stream AAC from Vista MCE to my Xbox 360 (although I expect this will be fixed by the January release, I just can't wait). At this point the only advantage to me for AAC is the size issue, a 128 AAC file has significant savings over a 192 MP3 which in my opinion is equivalent quality. But my car, my media center, xbox 360 and much bigger iPods kind of outweigh that now. I look forward to getting volume leveling and track times in Media Center.
I am currently facing a huge conversion of the majority of my 13,000 tracks from AAC to MP3. I am yet to figure out what this means for MusicBridge, I may still need it I kind of hope I don't. If I decide not to continue with development I will either pass the code on to an individual who wants to carry on with the development, or just make it an open source project.
I honestly think that AAC is a better technology than MP3 but it just has not been picked up by enough manufacturers/systems and MP3's ubiquity is hard to beat. I am a little sad to make this transition, but I think it is the right thing to do. If anyone has any advice for the mass conversion I would be grateful. Currently I just plan to use iTunes to do the conversion.