I have heard a little about mpc lately and would be interested in trying it out for myself. If I use EAC for example to rip my cd's, what would I use to encode to mpc? When encoding to mp3 I usually use cbr 192 or 256, so what would be the best and easiest way to encode mpc files?

Thank you

Download the latest encoder (1.0) and uncompress it in directory of your choice. Configure EAC to use User defined encoder, set file extension to .mpc and use browse button to find the mppenc.exe. By default mppenc uses --standard profile which is probably enough for your needs. If, however, you need higher quality, just type the parameters on the Additional parameters -field. Happy encoding.

Be sure to check out this website xmixahlx audio

I think this can answer a lot of questions you have already.

BTW a good job to give MPC a try, I think you will be surprised with the quality it can deliver especially at bitrates over 200kbps. Which I think you wanted to use?

my encoding line : --insane --minSMR 0 --nmt 12 --tmn 28

should give perfect results on 99.99999% of the wavs

To tag your files with APE give Speek's tagger a look.

APE =~ ID3V1 but much better (simpler) and with much less restrictions regarding fieldsizes etc

hope this helps you out a bit

and my encoding line --xtreme

should give perfect results for 99.9% of the wavs.

Choose whatever you like based on bitrate constraints, if the 0.0999999% is worth the increase.

@lucpes

I use that line because I'm archiving and I may be transcoding to MP3 or OGG in the future for hardwarecompatibility reasons, and hey my aim was to fit just 6 albums on 1 CD-R and this line gave me just that.
I know I probably won't hear any difference on any music with this line compared with --extreme or --standard but it gives me a good feeling to know my MPC's have some "breathingroom".
I used the 99.99999% line just to show that there will probably be some rare instances that even this line will fail to provide transparency but you don't have to take the 0.99999% seriously though I just typed so many 9's to empathise just how darn good MPC can be with these kind of commandlines.
I would still pick --standard or --extreme over --alt-preset insane anyday.

i made a site to answer just these types of questions...

check out the musepack, links, and download section of my site, as almost everything else is not even close to being finished...

everything you need is in the download section, i encourage newbies to download the musepack bundle to further ease the process...

in the mpc batch encoder i included some premade commandlines, to suit individual needs [i.e. size differences]

use EAC to rip and DISALLOW all tagging with EAC. use mpc batch encoder to convert your wav files to musepack. it is that simple!

Thanks guys for all the replies. since I am new to this I'm sure I will have many more questions about this, so please be patient with me . BTW, in case I missed it, is there a default setting for mpc for cbr? For example if I want just 256 bitrate. Also, is 256 in mpc the same as a file encoded in 256 mp3 size/quality?

Thanks

PS

I'm going to go read "xmixahlx's" site and see if I can get the hang of this.

nube question, but is it ok to use the eac commandline thingy for my mpc options? What does the batch do that EAC doesnt? I dont use replaygain (mainly cause im clueless as to what it does)

MPC is completely VBR. You cannot specify a constant/average bitrate like you can with LAME MP3. To achieve a certain bitrate, you'd have to change the command line switches by trial and error - not recommended. MPC is quality-oriented and might consider CBR to be an unwanted compromise. Ogg is the same way (though a little different).

An 256kbps MPC file will demonstrate less artifacting than a 256kbps MP3 file. In many cases, they should both sound identical to the original WAV, but MP3 will deviate more often. MPC is basically unbeatable at 256kbps right now.

I am getting this error message when trying to use mpc batch encoder.

"Component Tabctl32.ocx or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing or invalid"

????

Cool, simple enough...thanks for the answer to that question.

Install this:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/~w.speek/download/tabctl32.zip
and this:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/~w.speek/download/MSCOMCTL.ZIP

At your system folder. (Unzip them first. )

Regards;

Roberto.

Damn, you guys are good and fast to answer questions around here! Thanks for the help, that fixed the problem . Now I need to mess around with it a little and figure this mpc stuff out.

thanks guys for all the info and help

Please dont hit me , but since I am new to this and the "BEST" quality is what I want...What is the best setting for mpc batch encoder to achieve the best quality?

Thanks

BTW, I listen too and encode all types of music so...

i do believe that there are different theories surrounding this out there right now.

personally, i use mppenc --standard --ltq fil

it provides decent quality while not exploding the bitrates.

i also listen to every different type of music you can think of and i havent really heard any noticeable artifacts... of course i dont listen to music to try and hear artifacts...

in any case that is what i suggest...

**shameless plug**

i also suggest www.musepack.org for software... mostly becasue it is my site, but also becasue it has a faitly comprehensive list of windows based mpc software.

**shameless plug**

(kinda disheartening that i took the effort to make that site and its left to me to mention it...)

just in case you were wondering, yes i know this isnt the BEST quality, but i believe it gives the best size/quality ratio

I was using "--extreme" on a couple of files since I am new to this and learning, but I was very disappinted in the quality from wave to mpc, I had a bunch of artifacts on the files I had encoded, but then again it could have been something I had done. Anyways, I enjoy learning about this and hopefully I will get the hang of it. Quality is the most important thing to me, size really isn't an issue right now.

Spase, your site is in my favorites now with the others mentioned above, I like to read and learn .

Thanks

well for an easy solution for better quality than insane, you might want to try the braindead profile (--braindead)

frank tells me it was devised simply to prove that insane was not the highest theorhetical quality you can achieve

Standard. It was designed with standard as optimal setting. Gives you best relative sound quality and should be transparant in 99.99+ cases. If you really wanna be paranoid do xtreme. If you're insane, go with insane, and if you're braindead, go with braindead.
Or go lossless.


But my best advice: Go with the Xiph

I agree 100%. MPC is not LAME where you need 2^64 command line switches to reach acceptable quality (times before APS I mean).

Perhaps the MP3 & LAME world has introduced a mental doctrine "always use the highest possible quality switches because it won't sound good otherwise".

Well, the truth is that MPC --standard does sound good. Most of the time it sounds better than LAME with --alt-preset insane.

Going directly to modified --insane switches without even testing --standard IMO is a huge overshoot and demonstrates questionable reasoning. My suggestion to MPC newbies would be that try the --standard profile out. I dare you to find any audible artifacts with any kind of music with it. If you do, report it here at Hydrogenaudio with samples, and by all means switch to modified --insane or preferably go lossless .

Yes, this doesn't sound right to me.

I would just like to step in here for a brief rant.

I'm a musician/composer/producer/blablabla and I listen to music quite critically. I have decent ears and I pay a lot of attention to detail when listening. My equipment is very decent and consists of both hifi-speakers, studio monitors and headphones (with a headphone amp, even!). I like walks in the park and...err nevermind.

I've been using MPC since last summer and have encoded about 400 CD's so far, everything from string quartets to weird electronica, from solo harp to death metal. A lot of my own stuff too, which is somewhere inbetween the categories listed, and for natural reasons I'm very familiar with their "sound".

I use different settings for different material, but mostly --standard --ltq fil, or --xtreme. I've never gone higher than a tweaked --xtreme, raising the NMT and TMN values slightly.

There have only been a couple of occasions where the output has not been matching the input. Tweaking the settings has always fixed this for me (and I'm not tweaking upwards nearly as much as the lines mentioned above).

I'm not saying MPC is perfect and transparent on every single piece of music, nor that people who claim to hear great quality loss are hearing things that aren't there. I'm just saying that MPC is do damn good most users shouldn't even bother tweaking it. Even --standard is way better (and in several ways) than any MP3 out there. There are good reasons for why the presets have their names - --xtreme is just that, dito --insane.

If you don't care about bitrates, go lossless or go nuts tweaking. If you do, spare yourself the headache and go with a simple --xtreme. Rest peacefully knowing that it's a notch better than the "average" --standard preset, and feel content with the quality until you safely ABX a difference. Don't stare at the bitrate display or listen to your brain - just enjoy the music, and enjoy the benefits of a friggin amazing lossy codec, perhaps the finest one there is.

One final note: people new to MPC should of course be given as much information as possible, but I'd hate to see people get the idea that MPC requires lines like --insane --minSMR 0 --nmt 12 --tmn 28 to "shine". Everyone will claim they're after quality, but seeing as most people are likely former MP3 users, --standard will meet that demand.

Cheers, and happy listening!

Uosdwis

Ok to everyone out there explaining why they are using --standard or --extreme over my tweaked insane line.

In a sense you guys are right because I myself can't hear a difference between --standard, --extreme or my line. The point is I'm archiving all of my albums and I want to do this only once, a couple of months ago I was using insanely MP3 lines (that gave me higher bitrates then what I'm using now).
So for me this is a big step forward in quality and also in filesize.
As I explained here or in another thread my bitrates hover around 250 - 260 kbps avg for most of my stuff which was exactly what I was looking for.

To make it clear to everybody you don't need --insane --minSMR 0 --nmt 12 --tmn 28, --insane or --extreme to enjoy MPC encoded music!!
I apologise if I gave anyone the wrong idea as in that they have to use this or that line because else it will sound bad, truth is MPC will often give you better results at 160 and more kbps than any MP3 can give you on hard to encode music.

I hope this clears things out a bit. I was a bit to enthousiastic I guess

The main problem I seemed to notice when I used "extreme" was the music was a lot louder than the original wave...and seemed to have a muffled (<----is that a word? ) sound. I will use the "standard" setting next and go from there, im sure that will be good enough for me .

Thanks for all the good info, I appreciate it a lot. I also appreciate you guys treating a newb with respect...it shows a lot of class.

EDIT/Update...

Besides the music sounding muffled that I have encoded, it also has a lot more of a bass sound, almost too much...thats what I mean by muffled. BTW, I still notice this using the "standard" setting.

You are doing something probably with EQ and/or replaygain related thing that is causing this.

Can you download this abx program here:

http://www.pcabx.com/program/ABX173_setup.exe

And do some blind listening tests? You will need to encode a .wav file to .mpc then decode back to .wav and load it up in this program. The rest is fairly self explanitory.

The reason I ask this is because at least once a month we get reports from people about various codecs sounding "muffled", or having "not enough bass" or "too much bass".. and about 99% of the time, these claims do not pan out when the listener is asked to perform blind listening tests.

It is the policy of this forum to use these techniques to validate whether or not the statements being made about quality are correct or not, so please don't take offense to this either.

And btw, you might want to check your winamp to make sure that you aren't using any sort of EQ or DSP, and that you aren't using clipping prevention either when you compare the MPC to the original .wav. Any of these things can alter the sound enough to make someone think something is wrong with their encodings.

I am a musician of 24 years, a professional musician of 14 years. I play and listen to many forms of expression and I, too, am critical when it comes to music. Knowing that we're dealing with compression and music together, I afforded the compression schemes some leniency when I used to use Lame. However, with MPC, I feel I don't have to, or not as much as before. In all my 800+ cds I've only had an audible acoustical problem from MPC about 5 times. One of those was a blatant encoding glitch that I missed halfway through the song when I was checking the finished encoded files. The other times the resulting files just didn't sound as close to the originals as I've come to expect from MPC. Nevertheless, I still use MPC and recommend it highly because I can live with that level of success rate.

I forgot to mention, I have used the Insane setting from day one and don't have the problems reported by others here. My ears are healthy and very well kept(earplugs at concerts, etc).

this is a dangerous question to ask...as the musepack format can theoretically achieve bitrates higher than 1000kbps [1 mb]

i see no need in any situation to pass:

--insane --nmt 16 --tmn 32

that is generally considered the "reasonable ceiling"



if you aren't using the insane setting for the primary reason of encoding the entire bandwidth [much of which you cannot ever hear, even with perfect hearing] then i suggest you use a different commandline or profile.

the braindead ["--braindead"] profile was designed to show that the insane profile was not the greatest quality that musepack could achieve at the average bitrate of insane....

i would say more...but just go to the musepack page at http://xmixahlx.cjb.net if you want to know more.

later
mike

I'm new to mpc too, recently I encoded some wavs with the Xtreme profile and I must say, it sounds really good! I got a question:

--insane --nmt 16 --tmn 32

So does this setting provide better quality than just regular --insane? Does it use more bitrate? Or did I get it the other way round?

Yes and yes.

Hello everybody!
Where can I read some easy stuffs about MPC's presets wrote by MPC's creators (it seems to me that no one really knows which presets are really usefull so maybe "Frank & Co" do)

I guess you already tried Frank's page...

Anyway, here it is:
http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/

Regards;

Roberto.

Right here: Buschel's page:

"...Will the "-standard"-profile do for encoding or should I use "-xtreme" or even "-insane"?

The encoder was tested intensively and optimized in "-standard"-profile, the default setting. In this mode the quality of the encoded tracks reaches - despite the profile's naming - very high level!
The next profile "-xtreme" uses slightly modified parameters to lower the quantization noise further below the masking threshold - it offers even more headroom.
For the "-insane"-profile the parameters are tweaked heavily. Using this mode will store the full bandwidth of the input signal and lead to much higher bitrates than "-standard" or "-xtreme" need. The storage of full bandwidth is not based on psychoacoustic reasons - it was implemented at some users desire.
Summarization: When using "-standard"-profile you will get high quality audio-files. If you want to push it a bit further use "-xtreme". The use of "-insane" is not necessary in general."

Visit my site as well: quick gide for beginners

Cheers!

/kdo

--braindead --ltq_gain -12 --minSMR 3 --ltq_max 65 --nmt 16 --tmn 32 --ans 0") could very well be the best encoding line. Would anyone care to dispute and tell us why you disagree? Thanks Jeff

Best line is --verbose --verbose . Bitrate is really low and quality really high.

I would call that line an exaggerated overkill. But I'm no expert in MPC, so feel free to bash my opinion.

Regards;

Roberto.

Xtrem is very good for sure but is it good enough for perfect transcoding? MPC will maybe have a short lifetime. Would "braindead" be a better choice or is it actually useless?
Thanks.:confused:

With the proliferation of cheap hard drive space (e.g. Dell was selling a 120GB 7200rpm drive with 8MB cache for ~$140 last week), you could use --braindead if you want to transcode later on. For first generation listening, however, --xtreme is generally acceptable over 99% of the time.