Wich one would you choose to archeive your music considering both codec future ?

Soren

gday...


well. (fishing)

standing on two feets.. i would go for mpc 10.
a big BUT.
as for marketing and compabilety.. ogg would be the future codec
of those two.. (yeah. i know.. ) but for mpc`s case..
something drastic would need to happen. (development.)

i simply love MPC.. so i hope a live to see a 10.
(a SV 8. as new years present.. have been awesome.)

none,
both Ogg Q9-10 & MPC Q9-10 are insane settings for lossy audio,
transparency is reached somewhere between Q5 & Q6 for these codecs,
increasing the quality setting will only output bigger files for no "hearable" quality gain.

If you don't care about size & want perfect archiving, go Flac Q8 or Ape Extra High,
personnaly for music audio I use Flac Q8/Ogg Q5.

[Edit for JohnV This is indeed my very humble opinion ...]

lol
you should really get into losslesss encoding
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/show.php/showforum/19

This is very subjective, so you should mention that this is your own opinion.
Some people are able to hear differences way above q5/6.

True, but aren't the higher quality levels less tuned ? Also, don't you also get diminishing returns when you go higher than e.g. -q6 ?

I also remember that, when a problem sample is found that's ABXable at -q5, it's often also ABXable at higher bitrate settings.

Personally, for the bitrates you get with MPC -q10 or Ogg Vorbis GT3b2 -q9, I would prefer Wavpack hybrid or Optimfrog Dualstream. It doesn't suffer at all from the typical psychoacoustic artifacts like preecho or dropouts.

Of course, going lossless would be perfect, if diskspace is not an issue.

Day..

HMS..
did i completely misread the question..
or is the question easy to misread.

If q5/6 is unacceptable you probably should be using lossless. IMO anyway.

You're speaking about Vorbis, correct?

I thought that MPC was only flawed on specific samples at this high of a bitrate.

You have the wrong idea here. If something is non-transparent, it doesn't have to be "flawed" since it can be very close to original, and transparent for 99.9% of people. Only lossless can guarantee totall "flawlessness" in that sense.

So which lossy encoder would be the ultimate high bitrate (300 kbps+)
solution?
Musepack, or wavpack/optimfrog lossy?

Wavpack hybrid or OptimFrog Dualstream, IMHO.

In his listening tests, den has found that those hybrid codecs perform much better at transcoding than e.g. MPC -q10.

Also, those hybrid codecs don't suffer from any of the typical artifacts caused by psychoacoustic codecs.

Yep, I certainly prefer Wavpack/Dualstream in this bitrate range. If you want the quality, and ability to transcode to other smaller/portable lossy codecs as needed with minimal artifacts, Wavpack/Dualstream certainly impress.

I'm still playing with the new Wavpack4 alpha, but it also seems to be transparent at lower bitrates than previous.

If you are using mpc 10, or Vorbis 10, I suspect you'll find either Wavpack lossy or Dualstream quite attractive at a similar bitrate and offer you other possibilities, although it is not clear from your post whether you plan to just use these files on a PC, or occasionally transfer them to other formats/devices.

I'm sorry I can't link to the threads for previous posts on this subject, but I typing this on a flaky Hong Kong airport terminal between flights.

As others have said above, you could also consider going lossless if you have the space, or a combination of lossy/lossless with Wavpack or Dualstream.

Have a play with them all. It's great fun, and a very educational experience.

Den.

Is Wavpack4 publicly available? I know it's still an alpha, but I've been looking forward to seeing (hearing) it's progress.

Using APE extra-high is also quite a big nonsense, ´cause it uses much too much ressources compared to the high-mode and produces only about 1 or 2 % shorter compressed files.
But with the other things you said, i fully agree with you. "Archiving" and "lossy codec" don´t fit together at all.