a classical music and mp3 issue? Options

[twlkwind]

Is it true that classical music lose more details after encoded with lame or other encoder like mppenc?

[hans-jürgen]

I've been pushing the mpc format on my forum since i know it's better audio quality and faster encoding speed.

OK, but have you heard it for yourself? For example there is one user here who even can't find any adequat words in his own language to describe how bad MPC sounds to him with his favorite harpsichord music at low bitrates.

There is only one thing i want to know:
Is there any relation between music style and compression format? You know different music has different behavior. So is it your opinion that we can encode POP and Classical and Jazz and all the other music using Lame's standard switch(alt-presets) in order to get the transparent audio quality? The well-known critical songs shouldn't be included of cource.

As you can see from the above example, you really can't generalize that much, although almost everyone here seems to like it that way. The sound of a harpsichord is indeed a part of "classical music", but due to its own characteristics is bound to be a "codec killer". So does this fall under your exception "well-known critical songs" or not? I don't know...

From my own recent tests at low bitrates I would rather say that MPC might be very good with complex sounds from classical music like huge orchestras in late Romantic compositions (Mahler, Bruckner and the like) or operas, because it doesn't alter the stereo image even at ~96 kbps. Also it doesn't introduce any white noise like Ogg Vorbis which is important for vocal music (female and male voices in opera or chamber or church music) and for the timbre of violins or wind instruments.

Furthermore you should not forget AAC as an alternative compression format for MP3, because it is more efficient and sounds quite similar to MPC (at least to me). But if file size is no problem at all (like it seems to be for the person who suggests the lossless format), you might also be happy with LAME's alt-preset standard or extreme. The most important thing is that you should not trust anything someone tells you (especially me), but rather test it for yourself before making generalizing comments.