Why does there seem to be a lack of interest in Musepack? Options

[nycjv321]

Musepack is still as good as mp3 if not better and on par with modern codecs and vorbis and aac so why does no one talk about it? I was murking around the forum wiki and found out musepack was opensource which is a big plus for me... and older abx tests have it on par with aotuv or lame so why no talk? is it becuase of slow development? I think this is unfair if the codec is already so good no more tuning is needed..... any reason why people don't use mpc anymore other then compatibility? (converting from lossless to another format isn't too trivial... lol....)

[Grinderman]

I returned relatively recently to HA after quite a long time away, and I was surprised at the apparent change in attitude to MPC - from being *the* preferred lossy codec, it seems now to be almost treated with disdain by many here.

I think the "problem" (if you can call it that) is that it started from a very high level in terms of quality - this was certainly the reason I adopted it several years ago as my lossy codec of choice. From what I learnt from this forum, and from my own experiences, it was more or less "done" at an early stage in terms of perceptual transparency, apart from a handful of freak cases - any future sonic improvements would by definition be rare, subtle and undramatic, and I saw this as a benefit rather than a weakness.

I guess it was always likely that other codecs would eventually catch up, but IMHO that doesn't diminish Musepack's original achievement, or mean that it's in any way a "bad" lossy option today, unless you need certain features unrelated to perceptual transparency that other codecs can provide.