I'm a little confused as to the place in the encoding process that the handling of lossless compression sits.

Does mppenc support reading of these lossless codecs and subsequent compression into mpc, or does it use the mpc file as a container for the lossless audio stream?

If it will take input files compressed with lossless codecs can somebody please point me to some documentation on this process?

Thanks everyone,

G

Encoder calls executables of lossless compressors and uses pipes to get decoded wav from them. So to mppenc it's similar to reading wav.


You don't need to do anything special, just use lossless files as input instead of wavs.

Alright, I'll try it again and see what I might have been doing wrong. I tried Monkey's a few weeks ago and it told me the file was an invalid waveform or some such thing.

Thanks

G

It was a bug in Monkeys Audio. Frank fixed it on Linux version but not immediately in Windows version. The MAC.exe that comes with mppenc 1.01i works.

Here's what I get.

D:Ripped>mppenc --insane --verbose "(01) Long Beach Dub Allstars - Wonders Dub I.ape"
MPC Encoder 1.01i --Alpha-- © 1999-2002 Buschmann/Klemm/Piecha
ERROR: Unable to read or decode: '(01) Long Beach Dub Allstars - Wonders Dub I.ape'

I have the encoder and all it's accompanying files in a directory called musepack and the directory is in my path variable. Anybody know what I'm doing wrong? I tried "D:Ripped>mppenc --insane --verbose *.ape" and got the same error.

Thanks for the help.

George

Download this http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/bin/APE_Binary_Windows.zip and try again. Works perfectly here.

That version was actually 4 minutes older than the copy I had already, but it still gives me the same error. Typing just mac at the command line starts the Monkey's Audio Command Line comp/decomp utility 3.96b4.

Running the program from the Musepack directory and specifying the ape file location generates the same error. The files were compressed with MAC 3.96b2 dll in EAC at the high compression rate.

Edit: I'm running Windows XP with all the latest compatibility patches and security patches.

Try if mac.exe can decompress the file at all. Maybe beta2 is not compatible with that version.

Okay, discovered that I got the command line wrong when I ran it from the musepack directory. Must have hit the up arrow before hitting enter. Just looked back at it and it listed *.ape as the input file again. Specifying the file that way does in fact work.

The only problem now is that the tag information is lost in the transition. I can use mpcenct to encode and write an ape tag, but I don't know how the tag info is pulled from the ape tag in the first place. It'd be nice if the process didn't have to be completely manual. Seems like the encoder should be able to pull the tag info across since both are in the APE format.

That's would be really good options to add to mppenc. Hopefully Frank adds it.