Apparently have read that the camera isn't that bad actually.


But anyway, I actually downloaded iTunes 9, after hearing it apparently has a HE-AAC encoder.  One thing, this damn installer is 88.8MB (32-bit, not going to guess how big the 64-bit version is)!  No seriously!  It's like bigger than all of the commonly used audio and video programs put together.
Tried installing on my VM'd XP SP1, but it complained that I didn't have a high enough SP, so installed on my other Windows VM, Win7 x64, and the installer complained that I should be using the 64-bit version (but did allow me to continue anyway).  As you'd probably expect from something which is bound to be full of bloat, it took a few minutes to install.  The Program Files\iTunes folder is 106MB, though I suspect this doesn't include the whole heap of other junk it installs.  Like with older versions, it tries to take over your system with its two kernel mode applications (iPod service and Bonjour).  Why a media player should ever need kernel access is beyond me.  It also installs two background user mode applications (iTunes helper and some QuickTime poo poo) to help ensure it screws up all your RAM.  Didn't bother to check whether it installed any device drivers - I presume the kernel mode services are enough...  Interestingly enough, thing takes forever to start up even having just closed it with Windows' Superfetch...
Right-clicking the song gives you the option to convert, however to actually be able to find the settings, it's actually stored next to CD import settings, when I can't seem to find the relationship about converting a file on my HDD with CD importing...  So much for good Apple interfaces.

Anyway, enough of my spiel.
Well, iTunes' HE-AAC encoder certainly seems to be at least about on par with Nero's and seems to exceed it in certain cases.  Haven't done a large sample to really test it though, and differences in general are small, so I'd still use Nero due to the fact that it's so much more flexible, has more options and isn't a 89MB download lol.

Apparently new iPods will support HE-AAC.  Well, I'm not interested in iPods, but this will probably mean that others will follow if Apple does it.