Lame APS nukes MPC 5 on Amnesia.wav, What the #@? Options

[Pio2001]

EDIT 02.27.2004 - Here is the sample : http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ST&f=35&t=19099

Hello,
First let me say that I'm a complete newbie in MPC (didn't encode anything until 2 days ago).
The common opinion in here is that MPC is way better than MP3 at high quality encoding, so I thought I would use --quality 5.

Since I prefer testing than trusting, I took a bunch of tests samples : Amnesia, short, vilbel, spahm, ravebase, and a sample of Rebecca Pidgeon- Granmother (an audiophile recording, not difficult for encoding).

And... big disappointment : amnesia sound UGLY ! Much worse than Lame APS : it rings.

ABX 16/16 at quality 5, 16/16 at quality 6, 8/8 at quality 7.

It still rings at quality 6, but the problem is gone in quality 7, there is just some unimportant noise left (still worse than Lame APS IMHO, but as Lame adds more noise, it becomes a matter of taste)

If we discard Short, that is an artificial sample, I find one big failure for Lame 3.90.2 APS (Badvilbel), and one big failure for Mppenc 1.14 beta --quality 5 (Amnesia) (decoded by Winamp plugin 0.97f).

Note that amnesia is a partly artificial sample, since it was normalized. The original peaked around -6 or -8 db AFAIR. On the other hand, it is a vinyl copy, so if it had been mastered on CD, it might have peaked higher anyway.

Amnesia is available is the test sample page. What do you think of it ?

I also searched for tests about MPC quality. I found Guruboolez one, that concluded that MPC 1.06 added a coloration to the sound of his sample in standard and extreme, but performed way better than Ogg and AAC. http://forum.hardware.fr/forum2.php3?post=...&trash=&subcat=

[Frank Klemm]

Hi,

I moved some changes in the SV8 tree back to SV7, hopefully this will reduce some of the problems.
I can't move all SV8 changes to SV7, the format do not support some of the new features.

Bitrate is increased by typically 3.1% compared with 1.14. Most of this bitrate increase is related to
some modificitions in the tonality estimation model (which was introduced with 1.15g).

There are also some other changes which have nothing to do with quality (some counters are now
64 bit to overcome problems with very long movie sound tracks), and these must be tested very carefully.

mppenc 1.15q for Linux will be uploaded in the next minutes. Windows version will take a little bit longer.