not much between them is there?
which one should I use now. I am confused cause Winlame does even support mpc for some reason even though its got developers from this forum making it.

quality is the only way forward.

oh and by the way check out the artist
Jamie Cullum

jazz singer. brilliant

Why WinLame? Use Foobar2k, Frontah, ... Any of them should do it.

dont know how to use foobars compression options. dont understand. no guide!.......

imho ogg is a decent jack of all trades and master of none. If you want quality you clearly choose mpc. However without hardware support I decided on AAC which I expect will have better hardware support than ogg in the near future and also has better quality per ogg in listening tests. Now if Frank would just apply his psy model and decoding optimization (which he says he can do!?)from mpc to aac everything would be right in the world.

OGG is a container and MPC is a codec, so you can`t compare them.

If you mean Vorbis vs MPC, this is my opinion:
Go for MPC if bitrate is above 160kbps, if it`s belove 160kbps go for Vorbis.

I'd change 160 to at least 128.

http://audio.ciara.us/test/128extension/results.html

Maybe even lower.

You could try Garf's optimized Vorbis compile that will work better/more efficient with higher bitrates (should be more comparable to MPC), compared to the standard release which is indeed very good at low bitrates ...

Additionally, Vorbis has the better chances to be implemented in future hardware players ... so if compatibility is an issue you might consider that fact ... I seriously doubt that there will ever be hardware support for Musepack.

AAC is an option, too ...

Install Foobar2k special version.

Go to Preferences -> Diskwriter. Select Output Format: Musepack and Ourput Directory. Then select quality under "Musepack Encoder".

Load the files you want to encode. Right Click-> Convert -> Run Conversion.

Then load the converted files and Right Click -> FreeDB -> Get Tags. This will tag your files perfectly. Then select files-> Right click-> Replaygain. This will replaygain them.

To make foobar look good check: Foobar formatting and Foobar looks. Unfortunately those plugins do not come in the special package but these sites clearly explain what you should do and it's easy.

thanks. oddly enough lame.exe crashes...?

If LAME crashes, there's high probability, that you have overclocked your CPU and it is unstable now

I don't think that step is needed. At least when i encode AAC files they come out already tagged. Is MPC different for some reason?