Sony to support AAC audio format As one of the comments on the iLounge site indicates, "It's about time!" Why no one but Apple acknowledges that MP4 is the logical successor to MP3 is beyond me. If they had called it MP4, perhaps there would have been less reluctance to follow Apple's lead. After all, a lot of people were confused in the first year or two (and many still are!) by the acronym AAC, referring to it as the "Apple Audio Codec" or some such. Of course, it's not. It also has nothing to do with Apple's Digital Rights Management (DRM) encoding scheme... AAC is entirely independent of Apple, except that it's the standard audio format Apple chose when developing the iPod and iTunes. AAC is "Advanced Audio Coding", also known as MPEG-4 Part 3, or even MPEG-2 Part 7. Ya gotta admit, none of those has quite the ring that AAC does. Read all about it at Wikipedia.