I think it's interesting to find out what is the most popular preset people here are using.

I've seen there already was a thread with similar question (a couple of monthes ago), but not so many replies. Here it would be nice to watch the statistics... :-)


If you use various presets for different purposes, then try to pick up the one you use more often.
(I assume it's not technically possible for the same user to vote twice, right?)

/kdo

--braindead --nmt 15 --verbose

--extreme for my own CD
--insane --nmt 16 --tmn 32 for the others

--xtreme --ltq ank

There's no sense in using a really sensitive ATH when I'm listening to my music next to a computer with 8 fans. I can't discern 15KHz lowpassed music from the original, either. I'm sure I could use --standard with no problem, but --xtreme just gives me an extra level of safety against artifacts for when I transcode to mp3 (for my portable).

Anything with a higher bitrate or more exotic switches just seems like... overkill.

I use standard. If I someday were to hear problem with it I would re-rip and encode with SV8.

I just use standard. i don't have "golden ears", but i just want to keep my music with the best possible quality at a reasonnable size...

I was an xtreme only user until I took it a sample CD to a truly high-end stereo store and listened to my music on a $30KUS setup. A friend of mine picked out the samples correctly (spliced sections of the same song encoded at different rates and decoded to wave then burned to CD) and I heard some slight though possibly psychological differences. Since I truly want to have as close to CD as possible without going lossless, I switched to Braindead since I was already using insane for other people's CD's. I've got the disk space and psychologically I sleep better at night knowing it sounds better.

Standard most of the time. Xtreme for samples I'm likely to transcode later into mp3 for portable use.
I doubt I'll ever be able to tell the difference between a std and xtr encoded song, much less get annoyed by it (Hell, I can often tolerate Xing 128 when I am not concentrating much on the music), so anything else is guaranteed overkill for me.
I really can't understand how anyone would like anything above Xtreme for listening purposes only, but hey, it's their ears, their disk space, their life.

Archiving, DVD-R :

--insane --ans 0 --ltq_gain -12 --nmt 15 --tmn 34 --shortthr 2
(plus --scale whatever MPPENC asks for)

Casual listening, hard-disk (re-encoded from the archived files) :

--radio

I use --extreme for all I encode, even though I might not tell the
difference between --xtreme and --standard. It's just a precaution.

___________
Tobbe

plain vanilla xtreme for me, please. mmmh

seriously, to me xtreme seems to be the best quality/size tradeoff, with that extra bit of safety - should i ever want to transcode to mp3 for a portable..

I use:

--insane --nmt 16 --tmn 32 --verbose

(not that verbose alters quality, I copied the line from the batch encoder)

I also apply replaygain --auto (I can't seem to get --autoHQ to work)

To be sure, the psychological quotient gdougherty refers to is a factor. With 3 80gig harddrives in my file server, I should have ample space, despite the high bitrates I am dealing with...

My commandline :

--insane --minSMR 0 --nmt 12 --tmn 28

I really am surprised of the commandlines I've seen here, some of them will really give some insanely bitrates me thinks .

I mean standard has been developed to sound transparant with 99% of all music, do any of you guys hear a difference between standard and your commandlines mostly??

I use --nmt 16 --tmn 32. It's not for hearing a difference (standard profile is perfect, or near, for me). This commandline gives great quality for a later VERY GOOD transcoding (the CD are not mine). Lossless is often too big (600 Kb/s vs 320 Kb/s on classical music).

You know what I think is also funny : we just can't resist tweaking commandlines can we??

I once read a thread where someone suggested just to use the normal profiles because their names say exactly what they do, and I think this is true but hey where's the fun in that??

I really would like to know what commandlines Dibrom, Frank Klemm and Andree Bushell use because I guess they're the ones who have some golden ears around here.

If you mean Andree Buschmann, he uses standard.

Considering the results of the poll, perhaps an idea for the MPC developers would be to make extreme equivalent to standard, insane to extreme and braindead to insane, and then claim a breakthrough in entropy coding which makes files 30-40kbps smaller.

Noone would hear the difference I bet.

--
GCP

Yep I was referring to Andree Bushmann, all those names are getting to me lately
Thanks Case, it's quite interesting to see that a developer of mpc uses standard while we are all using those insanely tweaked commandlines.

Ok maybe from a transcoding point of view we (myself included) might have a point tweaking the commandlines to get better (audible??) results.

I wonder what Monty uses for encoding oggs

--
GCP

--braindead --ans 0 -ms 0 --nmt 32 --tmn 40

Used to use insane, now I use xtreme or standard depending on the material being encoded.

... --standard

Dezibel

--xtreme --nmt 12 --tmn 28. I think it is better then --insane, but the file size is the same.

Mostly (90% of the time) --standard, somtimes --xtreme

Really cant make out much difference between 'standard' and 'xtreme' and IMHO 'insane' and 'braindead' are overkill (good for transcoding in future, though). For me, 'standard' rulez.

--insane --nmt 10 for personal use
--xtreme for others

Markus

No doubt he uses his own super secret burgundy red extra-strenght-dosis-of-the-dark-side tweaked compile of oggenc that doesn't even use -q but taps into his perception and encodes based on that. I know I would

Me-Mpc? Standard for 99.9 % of cases. Xtreme for those I treasure and are out of print Else I go lossless.

I stick to -xtreme
I encode with -insane sometimes for my favorite albums

I was using xtreme but i switched to standard, cause I can't hear a difference.

BTW. Love your picture Trelane.

I used to use plain old standard, but when I got a new hdd I thought I could spend a teeny amount of more bits and now use --standard --nmt 8 as a tradeoff between standard and xtreme (~195kbps). For me these files transcode fine to my mp3 portable. For those few CDs I own that I really treasure, or which are in rel. bad condition and have a little trouble ripping, I use --xtreme.
I guess I won't be in a condition to afford €30k+ equipment any time soon (or anything in the k range for that matter). So there is no point in speculating if I could hear any difference and if that difference would be annyoing. I might be able to make out a difference, but 95% perfection is enough for me (if you want to debate this number you are missing my point). Besides: I don't know if in ~20 years (when I will have too much money ) I will still want to listen to the same music that a listen to right now.
Bottom line: I use what's good for me now. That nmt 8 probably isn't necessary but it makes me feel good and should improve the quality of the derived mp3s.

--standard --ltq fil

For me works perfectly no problems that I can hear . For those who use insane, braindead and massively uptweaked insane what file sizes/bitrates are you getting?

Cheers
AgentMil

--xtreme for everything. Probably, standard would give me enough quality, but I just want some extra headroom (maybe I'll get high quality equipment some day ) to be sure.

@AgentMil :
I'm using a beefed up insane commandline

--insane --minSMR 0 --nmt 12 --tmn 28

I know that isn't really insane profile anymore ( according to silly people protection ), because I'm using
--minSMR 0, but hey thought you'd wanna know my average bitrage over my entire collection.

Avg bitrate : 253 kbps (wich was what I was aiming for, I'm a former mp3 apx user)

Peak bitrate : 345 kbps ( the corrs - unplugged, violins and trumpets drive the bitrates up quite nicely )

Hope this answers your questions

plain --xtreme all the way... Thinking about stepping down to --standard even, but I'm not sure if the bitrate savings will be worth it with the cost of diskspace these days - better just to be on the safe side

Hi,

--standard for most of my own CDs
--xtreme for borrowed CDs and my favourite albums

I'm using --xtreme, at the moment. I changed from --standard to --xtreme a months ago, even though standard profile is as transparent to me as xtreme. I'll keep using --xtreme, until... well, SV8 is out! But, I'm almost certain that i won't use more than xtreme. (who knows?)

Artur.

I get low 400s.

I have been using

--braindead or

--insane -nmt16 -tnm32

for all purposes (archiving of mine CDs and copying the CDs of friends)

The brilliant creator of mpc format said that sounds better than --insane switch for his ears..

OK... Can you think of anything better ?

Can you ask for something better ?

Transparency is achievable !!!

Replace -nmt16 -tnm32 with --nmt16 --tmn32, and they will actually work. With just a single "-", you are getting an NMT value of 9 and a TMN of 24. Not to mention that you use "tnm" instead of "tmn".

To answer the bitrate question, i get 270 to 320 kbps. I try to get the most out of MPC quality-wise with that setting, without going lossless. I have enough disc space. Maybe i should go lossless, but MPC is more fun. :coding:

Lossless gets really big, really quick. 67 CD's consume 21.7GB using Monkeys at high compression.

As for my braindead filesizes I'm getting an average of 240-256K according to MPEG Audio Collection. Considering how vastly superior Braindead is to 256Kbps MP3 this seems pretty good to me.

G

lol CiTay...



The following sizes show up as I encode a live soundboard source to musepack (which I am doing as I write this) using my preferred encoding switches-which are, btw:

--insane --nmt 16 --tmn 32 --verbose
(copied from the batch encoder "switches" option line)

264.5 kbps, 325.6 kbps, 328.7 kbps, 319.0 kbps, 334.9 kbps...

That is pretty usual, ocassionally it gets to 25x kbps, but that is as high as I remember ever seeing it.

I've used approximately 172 different switch combinations since I started using MPC in November 2001.

I use two combinations now: one for serious listening where transparency is the goal and one for background listening where size/performance is important.

Serious: --xtreme --nmt 7 --tmn 19 --ltq iso --ltq_gain -15 --ltq_max 70 --bw 18000 --verbose

Background: --xtreme --nmt 5 --tmn 14 --ms 1 --ltq iso --ltq_gain -10 --ltq_max 77 --bw 17500 --verbose

Never mind the "--xtreme" part. I use that to leverage those low-level xtreme tweaks that are not available through switches.

And why the ISO ath? Because its HF rolloff matches my own hearing limitations better. I prefer to use a more sensitive version of the ISO curve than a less sensitive version of the ANK and FIL curves.

Sizewise, the "serious" commandline produces files at around 170kbps while the "background" commandline produces files at around 130kbps.

I use this for most of my CDs:
--insane --minSMR 0 --verbose --verbose --forcewrite

Sometimes I use this:
--insane --minSMR 0 --nmt 16 --tmn 32 --verbose --verbose --forcewrite

I use the second one usually for CDs I've borrowed. Also, I've started thinning out my CD collection 'cuz it's just getting too big, so I'll use this to make copies of discs that I'm getting rid of.

I don't really know a whole lot about the different switches and what they do and haven't really bothered to do too much research other than read this board. The main reason I use these is because they came as preconfigured presets with a copy of MPC Batch Encoder that I downloaded recently from xmixahlx's web site and they give me files that are about the same size as the ones that I was getting using the LAME presets.

I'm sure that both of these are overkill for me, but I'm hopefully giving myself plenty of room if I want to transcode to MP3 or burn an audio CD. I know that my hearing isn't that great anymore (you know when you're young and stupid you just can't resist turning the volume on your Walkman all the way up), but I haven't actually had it tested. In very informal listening tests I did on my home stereo system, I wasn't even sure that I could pick out the samples that I encoded using --radio.