Moving entire FLAC collection to MPC, Will I have any regrets? Options

[Squeller]

mercurio! you use vorbis at q7.... what a such high bitrate! LOL
weird coming from someone who just told me that 128kbps is enough for everyone

You know q<n> is just a quality setting. I'm just saying this because there may be vast bitrate differences. I'm currently converting lots of stuff for my notebook, which is in the living room audio chain, at q8. With q8, classical compresses at around 200 kbps, idm electronica are often at almost 300 kbps... (aotuvb5)

[Melomane]

@bourne, in year 2000 i have started ripping cd, tried wma (horrible) bladencoder ( ahhh...) vorbis ( gapless, correct sound but slow slow slow encoding) lame ( slow and not gapless ) lossless ( problems with hard disc space) and mpc ( fast encoding, best sound, gapless)

5 years after changed to vorbis ( lancer encoder, super fast , lover bitrate at quality 7 than mpc insane and same ( or best ? ) quality sound, more hardware support than mpc)

today i think change to flac and lame v2 , no more problem to disc space, see the price of 1tb hard disc no problems of sound with lossless and no problems of hardware with mp3, also today encoding is fast with latest lame compile and recent pc.

[memomai]

I just can see the point that someone uses other lossy formats for transparency than mp3, when they also have their problem samples, less compatibility and so on... When someone wants to use low bitrate, then I can understand why he or she switched to another format.


You want transparency? Lame V2 - V0 offers transparency, as good as the other ones when they reach transparency status.

Transparency is transparency, lossless is lossless.

Use MP3 for transparency, use your favorite format for lossless!

[shadowking]

Its not that simple. MPC was designed for transparency at very modest bitrate. MP3 was not although it can deliver a lot of the time , there are monthly reports of problems here and its never going to end. Personally I feel more safe with MPC --standard than MP3 320k.. MPC --extreme : how many problem cases ??

Mp3 / aac patented / restricted, MPC is not. If one is doing 90 % of listening @ home and want a free / open high quality codec then MPC is a good choice. It decodes very fast so should be excellent with DAP. Now there is some commercial and rockbox support. It is also quite respectable for transcoding into other formats. Seriously I thing musepack --extreme @ 200k is enough for archiving for all but the most demanding listener and even then...

Most rippers and OS that we use support it. I suppose to choose it over Vorbis is a matter of personal taste. Since most HA users are still interested in lossy and it seems they like those mid-high bitrates then MPC should be considered again.

MPC as with mp3, aac , vorbis, is a dead end meaning you cannot go back and get the original WAV. LossyWAV can be transcoded to other supported lossless formats keeping its high compression, Wavpack lossy can create correction files. Maybe these days its mp3 or lossless and perhaps hybrid lossy methods. MPC, Vorbis and maybe AAC are all in the same boat

This post has been edited by shadowking: Jun 10 2008, 14:02

[smok3]

maybe more problems reported has something to do with the popularity of the format?

[wanderer]

I'm using MPC since 2003 after fighting with MP3 for a few years. My ears couldn't be satisfied with MP3 and I decided to try something better. Since then, I've seen very few improvements to MPC format, and I have to admit that Vorbis and AAC perform better in some cases. But there there are still some real samples when the MPC sound is "more transparent".

I've been a huge MPC fan in the past, now I'm pretty much disappointed regarding the evolution of the format. SV8 isn't so interesting to me because it doesn't add much quality to the current version of SV7. It is clear that MPC has a huge potential which is wasted due to lack of interest/time/resources/etc of developers. I don't blame anybody, I understand why the MDT can't progress faster and better, but... I'm just disappointed, having about 300 GB of music in this format and waiting for a miracle.

This post has been edited by wanderer: Jun 21 2008, 02:36

[shadowking]

I agree. I was also a big fan. You just used default settings and very rarely did it disappoint. 128 k and lower bitrate never really interested me. It covered most ends at --standard , otherwise --extreme. All it needed was some hardware support and a proper format (SV8).

You don't have to change (like you can still run old PC's and OS fine). If it works it works. Quality is still expected to up there with the best - do you have abxable samples from your cd's ?

The only alternative to MPC for me so far is wavpack lossy because lossless is the future and its harder to invalidate / kill a lossless codec. With the correction file system its futureproof while quality at the upper 200 k range is inline with the other codecs at high bitrate.

This post has been edited by shadowking: Jun 21 2008, 09:28

[Martel]

Try using ABR MP3 with raised lowpass instead of CBR. I cannot explain it but it sounded better to me than CBR.