Why xHE-AAC is adopted at Meta

We share how Meta delivers high-quality sound at scale with the xHE-AAC audio codec. xHE-AAC has already been rolled out to Facebook and Instagram to provide enhanced audio for features like Reels and Stories.

At Meta, we serve every conceivable media use case for billions of people around the world: from short user-generated content, such as Reels, to premium video on demand (VOD) and live broadcasts. Given this, we need a next-generation audio codec that supports a range of operating points with excellent compression efficiency and modern system-level audio features.

To meet these current and future needs, Meta has adopted xHE-AAC as a means of delivering high-quality audio at scale.

The advantages of xHE-AAC

xHE-AAC is the latest member of the MPEG AAC audio codec family. The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS played an important role in the development of xHE-AAC and the MPEG-D DRC standard.

Today, xHE-AAC already delivers a superior audio experience on Facebook and Instagram, including Reels and Stories, and has a number of useful features.

volume management

With hundreds of millions of downloads a day on Facebook and Instagram, we receive audio tracks with sound levels ranging from silence to full scale, and everything in between.

When users play these videos sequentially, they may perceive some sounds as too loud or too soft. This creates fatigue for the listener as they constantly have to adjust the volume.

xHE-AAC's built-in loudness management system resolves loudness inconsistencies while meticulously preserving creator intent by bringing the average loudness of all sessions to the same target level and managing the dynamic range of each session to adapt to the playback environment.

Instead of burning to a specific target level and Dynamic Range Compression (DRC) profile...