well, with the glimmer of hope that Frank may return to do a bit of work on sv8 I am resurecting this thread. Hopefully we can get enough ppl to contact companies and let them know there are consumers interested in MPC support on their DAPs.

hmm, I was always under the impression that probably the biggest hurdle to implementation was copyright...

you mean patent? I guess its up in the air (ie no one knows if its covered by patent for sure). However, even if it was it was said that the patents in question should have expired.

With HP getting ready to release a new DAP be sure to contact them:

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/fiorina/index.html

http://wwemail.support.hp.com/fd2/email_fo...ni=fd2-presales

The HP DAP will be the iPod. They won't even be supporting WMA, let alone MPC.

You know all the "glimmer of hope" "if only it will come true" talk I see around HA concerning the future of MPC reminds me very much of the Samuel
Becket play "Waiting For Godot" If you have never seen it, or read it, read a review of it on the internet sometime. You will see what I mean.

I realize that it will be the "iPod" but I dont know if this means they wont have any controll over it - such as adding support for an additional codec.

Yes, they probably have some say on codecs supported. But, as I said, if they aren't giving a damn about the second most popular format, I find it kinda hard they are interested in a little-known one.

Well, they may well realize that WMA support would just help to build a MS monopoly, which they may not want to help if they can avoid it.

On the other hand MPC is no threat. In fact I dont understand why the various companies dont allow communities to develop more codecs for their players. Im sure that within the MPC community their would be at least a few ppl with the know how that would be willing to develop the codec for implementation on various platforms, even if they had to sign an NDA and/or let the company do the final implementing.

Certainly employees of these companies visit this site. In fact I read that the main apple AAC developer is a member here (where is VBR?). I wish these people/companies would communicated and work with people to help them get the products they want.

Why not get online music distributers behind MPC:

http://help.emusic.com/cu/index.cgi

support@bleep.com

http://sib1.od2.com/common/home/index.asp <- Mycokemusic.com

http://www.mymusic.dk

http://www.soundclick.com/

[quote=guruboolez,Oct 29 2003, 03:05 AM] [QUOTE=Pike84,Oct 29 2003, 02:45 AM]

There's no massive migration yet. But there are only one vorbis solution (iriver) and one good mp4 jukebox (iPod). With the growing number of these compatible players, it would be hard to stay, for some people, with mpc and transcoding solution.
On the other hand, lossless will be more attractive, with the extended capacity of storage space. People maniac about quality will be more and more tempted by it (me, for exemple). Especially if various artifacts are reported, with no hope for correction. [/quote]
Well, the Rio Karma also plays Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, so you never know...

I've read this thread and now I'm a bit worried, since I'm making a backup of my 400 cds collection. Chosen format: MPC.

I've been using MP3 for years. It sounded the way it sounded, there wasn't anything to compare it to. Then I realized that it was me who didn't look for alternatives. I discovered FLAC, but discarded it due to the fact that I couldn't afford a bigger hard drive.

I chose MPC because it was the best for what I was about to do. Now I'm nearly there, about 250/280 cds already ripped and encoded (EAC + MPC). And only now I discover that the future of MPC is uncertain. I still don't know if I need hardware support, since the original plan was to build a very small and silenced livingroom computer to use it as a jukebox via my Denon hifi. The point is that with such a machine, probably running a small Linux distribution and Foobar, I really don't need to have portable devices to support MPC. But what if in the future I'll come to understand that I need it? I've even understood (hope I'm wrong) that there would be no backward compatibility with mpcs (sv7 > sv8)*: does it mean that even if there will be hardware support for mpc, I won't be able to play mine on portable devices?

* I've been searching the forum and found out that there should be a tool to losslessly convert sv7 to sv8. Good.

The thoughts that come to my mind right now are mostly these three:

1) Who cares if there won't be hardware support for MPC, I'll have my own machine which will give me access to my precious collection anyway. And if I ever needed to use a portable device, I could easily convert the music I choose to a different format, even a low bitrate mp3 will do good.

2) Or maybe I should switch to FLAC, a codec which seems to have a future, and throw away all the ripped stuff I have already on my hd. It would be a shame because it took a lot of time to rip it and tag it properly, but it would be a better solution because of quality and even re-compressing some songs to a hardware supported format would ensure a better sound quality.

3) Or should I wait for SV8 just to ensure me compatibility with the (ipotetical) future hardware support of MPC?

I'm confused, a bit worried too. And how the hell do I tell the forum to track the threads I post a message to? Can't find the button...

I am currently facing the same choice myself. Right now my entire CD collection (relatively small though: 200 CD's) is in FLAC, but one of my two hard drives recently died, and I need the room on the only one left. I plan to archive the FLAC's on DVD-R's and keep only high-quality lossy files on my HDD.


Well I tend to disagree: it would be a bit silly to have to re-encode already lossy files for your portable player (even if you do it on the fly, automatically), if you can choose another codec that is supported by that player and that is more or less on par with Musepack (I'm seriously considering Ogg Vorbis).


FLAC (or any lossless codec for that matter) certainly gives you peace of mind. But if I was to choose a lossless codec now (may 2005) instead of two years ago, I would also have a hard time deciding myself between FLAC (very good support) and TTA, which beats FLAC hands down both on speed and compression, but has much less support (for now).
If you have the storage capabilities and aren't nervous about your HDD dying, lossless is definitely the way to go.


From what I could gather, SV8 is major vaporware. I'm not saying that it will never see the day of light, but by the time it comes out, we might be lusting for high res., multi-channel content, and have larger storage capabilities (HD-DVD-R's and BD-R's come to my mind).


Look just below the thread title, on the right:
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If this were a hollywood film about tobacco companies, I would think:

" SV8 is frozen because TheBigBigCompany that is developing the UltimateEncoder (for them) found out that Musepack is absolutely the best, and being patent-free no one could make money from that. So they gave a multi-zero banknote to Frank and said 'sssshhht'.
The same is happening with the hydrogen propulsion and with the cure for cancer.
"

You're absolutely right, to re-econde the files to a hardware supported format would be a useless step, but at this moment I can't go back. I mean, I'm around the 300th cd, I can't think of having wasted my time. Nontheless, even if I love to hear a perfect and crystal sound, I can live with the mid/low quality of mp3's I would use with a portable device; it would sound good anyway if compared to the old walkman days.



I don't know much about TTA, I'll look around to read something about it, thanks.



Maybe you're right, by the time it comes out we'll be talking about who knows what kind of codec.



God bless you, thanks.

And don't forget about RIAA (or SIAE here in Italy): if a codec reaches a level where it sounds really good and it's very small, it's gonna spread over p2p and make life easier and better for downloaders. Besides the fact that I'm totally against those who prosecute kids who download a couple of songs for their own pleasure, that's bad for those companies. But that's OT here, so I'll stop here (though it sounds good for a hollywood script ).

skamp, you forgot WavPack, which seems to be better than TTA.
And it certainly evolves faster and better.

sorcanfaccia, transcoding MPC -> MP3 for your portable is not so bad as it may seem to be, if you are not that picky about the sound quality. MPC is already designed to be transparent, so it will be CD transparent, while MP3 --preset standard will be, like, “MPC transparent”.
For example, I can't notice a difference between “original” mp3 and transcoded mp3.

I recommend you go with option 4 which is: stop worrying and use whatever works for you now.

You can play the what-if game from now till eternity, but in my opinion and experience it's a waste of time. When I started archiving with Musepack a few years ago, there were also talks of SV8, and people were asking the same questions as they do now. SV7 is here now. It works well and it's very good.

When I switched from MP3 to Musepack, I didn't bother to re-rip most of my CDs since '--alt-preset standard' is also very good, and I really can't tell the difference in day to day use (and I probably couldn't do it in an ABX test either). Spend less time ripping your music, and more time listening to it.

To be honest, if I had old mp3's I would re-rip the songs to econde them with musepack, but I agree with the rest of what you said.



Now playing Ozric Tentacles' "Afterswish". But I had to rio it first, I just can't stop.

I'm usually all for jumping on the latest and greatest, but some times laziness just gets the better of me.

I probably will re-rip them soon. I might even go ahead at re-rip my entire collection (which isn't that big really) since, apart from a lot of it being MP3, even more of it is encoded with an ancient version of of Musepack, and a lot have happened with it over time. My whole directory structure is also a mess, but when I load it all into a play list and sort it by album, it all looks so tidy .

No I did think of WavPack, but immediately discarded it, since I run linux and there seems to be no playback support yet. I discarded Musepack too for the same reason until I found Quod Libet, which not only features gapless playback (which is quite rare), but also very good support for MPC.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=30615

Thanks, I didn't know about that plugin. Still, one (alpha) plugin for one application doesn't make WavPack widely supported under linux. I only use xmms for previewing songs from online stores, for the rest I use Quod Libet. So it's still not an option for me.

Wow, the feature list of Quod Libet looks quite impressive: replaygain support, gapless playback, full unicode support, etc...
http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet/wiki/Features

I really have to check out this player when I find some time...

I wouldn't consider that plugin alpha anymore, since all known issues have been fixed. I would call it beta at worst, due to lack of some features.

Also, it's worth mentioning there seems to exist a GStreamer plugin for WavPack as well. That might not count as widespread support under Linux, but should be enough for the vast majority of users.



For all that it matters, I couldn't find a TTA plugin for Quod Libet either. So, in that aspect, both WavPack and TTA are on par with each other.

Speaking of players, for those running *nix, mpd (http://musicpd.org/) is really worth checking, imo.
All the goodies, like rg, tags, gapless playback, alsa ao... It runs daemonized and controllabe via bunch of clients locally or remotely.
Musepack support will be in next release, it's already there though in svn/newer snapshot (http://musicpd.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=605)

(slightly offtopic continuation)
Cidade de Deus is a cool movie though