Wavpack Lossy Quality, As good as OGG, MPC or AAC? Options

[Lev]

I note that a certain pet bird has the signature line

WavPack (352/448 kbps) lossy for HQ lossy encodings and transcoding
LAME 3.90.2 (by Dibrom) --alt-preset extreme -Z --lowpass 21 or --alt-preset insane --lowpass 21 for my mp3s
MP2 384 kbps stereo for the classical music on my portable
MusePack 1.15r --insane --xlevel for archiving on CDs

Is he right in using WavPack, as opposed to MPC?

Something tells me the higher the bitrate, the more he likes it - There isn't an MP2 encoder as well tuned as Lame, and cranking the bitrate up to 384 isnt going to make the encoder more 'tuned'. And MPC insane / MP3 APX are virtually unnecessary overkills too; YMMV.

[den]

@HansHeijden
Thanks for making me aware of the lossy ape "beta", and the discussion around it a couple of years ago. I was very interested, and as I don't have Monkey's installed, I fired this one up and also checked out bryant's furious sample. I agree that it certainly gets the sample more "correct" than Wavpack. I could still ABX the Monkey's lossy version 10/10, but it was very close, and I was mainly sensing different levels of background noise, rather than artifacts in the "music" itself. I also tried Wavpack lossy at 400 kbit to more closely match bitrates, and it was much better than at 320, but not as close as Monkey's.

@bryant
Thanks for your comments about wavpack's performance and the sample itself. It was good to check out a sample that does trip it up so that I can be aware of potential shortcomings in Wavpack lossy.

Until now, I've been sticking to true stereo for lossy encodes when I am not keeping the correction file, because I was under the impression that the joint stereo may cause the odd problem. (I use Speek's front end with the high quality option checked, but as far as I know, it is not using the joint stereo switch.) If there was an easy way to make the joint stereo a safe joint stereo, without huge effort on your behalf, it sounds like a good idea. Otherwise, I might start trying some joint stereo encodes and see what happens. I've been very happy with the results so far though as it is. It's just that after checking out your furious sample, I'm starting to wonder about using joint stereo. Can you elaborate more on how risky it is?

@2Bdecided
You hit the nail on the head with regards to why I think Wavpack lossy has some potential. The additional noise, or lower S/N is still very reasonable, and I would much prefer a slight increase in background noise if the recording itself is still of "high quality" whatever that means, and less or no artifacts. When it's music you don't know intimately, the odd artifact is no big deal, but when you know the music shouldn't sound like what you are hearing, it get starts to get in the way of enjoying the music.

The huge benefit to me has been it's transcoding into ATRAC3 performance. Wavpack kills the other perceptual codecs consistently for this, and Delirium's explanation makes sense.

I'm going to check out this other sample of guruboolez out of interest now.

Den.

PS: @bryant, Sorry to drag you into the world of lossy, but I can't seeing this being your Vietnam somehow. Even if you don't develop this any further, I suspect you don't have much to worry about