you can play ac3 with a plugin very easily 2. aac is a very good format and beats MP3 a hundred times it has very good surround support and other nice features I am very happy about the aac support btw AAC is a pure audi codec without ID tags and stuff what you need is MP4 or m4a (mp4 audio) as a container for AAC stream to get the full advantages of AAC

They only called it "Surround Edition" because the version number is 5.1.. what the hell is AAC? Go to tuner2.com and have a listen to a 40kbps stereo aacPlus stream.... impressed yet? ... it's a newish format, yes it's not used often because it's NEW and too many people only know of MP3 and aren't aware of superior formats existing popular surround sound formats like ac3? ... ac3 is NOT suitable for music, DTS is, but I'd assume there's no out of the box support for DTS because of licensing issues - hey winamp is available to you, for *FREE*... and they're not the only surround audio formats - DVDA, vorbis also supports 5.1 (which IS supported by winamp), etc...

sunrise3500 is completely true a 96kbit AAC stream can beat a 160 kbit MP3 but is much smaller or you generatea 192kbit AAC stream and do have superiour audio quality and indeed AC3 is quite popular but DTS is much better anyway DTS and AC3 are high bit rate audio streams which are not comperable to MP3 / MP4 since their size is much much bigger also the problem is that DTS is highly secured by stupid licensing the VLC guys had to remove DTS support because of this and you won't find any applications that support DTS due to that... really bad but one good thing is that the Audigy 2 ZS and up has DTS and AC3 decoder integrated so you can use SPDIF to let the card decode the sound and btw you should ALWAYS do this !!! the sound is much much better when decoded by the audigy

The AAC Surround sound plugin is unstable as HELL... They need to fix it... When playing two demo songs (LLAMA's ASS And Africa Bombata) the "forward" button is pressed (to skip to another track) - BAM! Winamp crashes... When playing normal files (mp3's , OGG etc.) it's stable.

never got such an error ... try a fresh install

you are right ... I wish AC3 support by default, too but there are hunderds of different formats out there ... and you have to decide what does make sense and what not ... winamp is a music player and there is nearly no music in AC3 at all its NEARLY only used in movies .. so how much sense does it do to include it ... not very much ... so the dev must have serious reason to not include this format and again ... since all playback support is done via plugins it is very easy to gut the one you want ... and if foobar is so good why do you even read this news ? also there was aac+ support in winamp before 5.1 the version number is just cool ... thats just a cool joke ... and as you might have noticed the most important part is the 5.1 RECORDING !!! find a software that is able to record in 5.1 its very very hard