Edited by moderation: Split from here
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Are you sure you want to get into MPC at this point in time?
It looks like a dead end to me, and better alternatives (mpeg4 aac) with equivalent quality have become availibe in the last 6 months.

Just a thought.. I am slowly replacing my MPC encodes now. One additional reason is that seeking is not working very good with foobar & MPC format, its very jerky.
Make sure you dont do something that you might regret later, as re-ripping is pretty time consuming. Just 2cents....

Dead end? Hardly! For lossy archiving purposes, it is the best. As far as AAC being a better alternative with equal quality...I don't agree, especially on the quality side. It hasn't been tuned nearly as well, no lossy codec has. As for encoder version, I use 1.15r, just cause I feel some of the additional tuning info may be helpful to me. I have not come across any errors with it so far. As for the "Unstable/Experimental" in the tag, no worries, just put in your comment "Encoded by B@RLoG with 1.15r at quality 5 xlevel" or something to that effect, I do. Happy ripping

Agreed. AAC is still a rapidly evolving format, and if you rip to this format now, when it improves significantly a year later, you'll kick yourself.

Illogical. If you rip to AAC now, in a year later, you'll have listened to stuff at a very slightly worse quality for a year (although the lack of a warm and fuzzy feeling will probably hurt more), and you'll have to rerip to AAC anyway, when it has overtaken MPC.

Well... I guess it is up to the individual to choose between mpc and an alternative.

I picked mpc to replace mp3 for myself then, because it has been around for so long, and many HA users were heartily recommending it. Furthermore, I made my choice when I didn't have a portable.

Mpc gave me no problems from the start... there was (and is) effective documentation, no hassles and bugs, gapless playback, and a reliable transcoding source.

Only if prominent HA members stop talking about mpc and switch en masse to AAC or Vorbis, would I do likewise. It is still very competent now.

You don't know if you are alive tomorrow.


Because TODAY MPC KICKS ASS. MY 2 CENTS IN THIS ONE.

That's one of things SV7.5 and Matroska integration are supposed to correct.

With the donations for Frank's New PC going as well as they are this seems like quite a likely solution in the not-so-distant future.

@sony666:

IMO this is the most exciting time for MPC fans we have seen in the last year (at least) so I find it odd that you would be replacing your MPC files right now of all times.

By now i only see 2 reasons for you to change from MPC (Lossy Codec).

1 - If you want to preserve all the quality and go lossless (flac and so on...)

2 - If you want hardware support (MP3)

Well, quality wise atm MPC produces what it promises and will do so in the future (decoder is open source so no danger in using mpc). As what goes to AAC, Vorbis and other challengers...let us face it, they are not quality wise equal to MPC where it is strong (mid to high bitrates). Unless these other lossy formats evolve quality wise I'm going to treat their "potential" quality improvements like mpc-haters treat mpc's advancement --> promiseware (or even vapourware). When there's a real challenge to MPC's audio quality I'll reconsider the use of mpc again.

EDIT: grammar & spelling

That has to be the worst reason ever. It seems you have hardware/driver issues, not issues with MPC. In fact, it decodes with pretty much the lowest amount of CPU power compared to Vorbis and AAC.

When I read posts about MPC superiority I wonder how you are going to determine when the magical point you speak of is going to happen.

See for example:



Which I think is simply false as I'm sure from personal experience that AAC is competitive with MPC at mid bitrates, and this was confirmed by the listening tests a while ago (and AAC improved since whereas MPC didn't).

To be sure, MPC is good, but to say it's clearly the best...I've been failing to see any evidence for that for a while. Determining differences between good codecs at high bitrates is extremely hard. Things were much clearer say 1-2 years ago as AAC, Vorbis and so had clear failures, but today I wouldn't speak of any clear advantage.

I've seen this logic a lot and it makes as little sense as it ever did.

I wonder how many people waited for GT3 final.

I wonder how many people waited for MPC SV8.

If you're waiting because "AAC may improve significantly the next year", aren't you going to kick yourself because a) not much development happened the year you waited (not so likely) b) after waiting a year and encoding significant development still happens?

If you think you are able to predict such a huge industry and collection of unknowns, you should play on the stock market instead, it should be a good learning experience

Heheh.

Well, if things have come to a head as such between mpc and aac and vorbis (especially if developers, who are at the forefront of the codec scene, begin to dispute mpc's once-distinct superiority), maybe the time is almost ripe for a (another?) high bitrate test.

But he was talking about seeking speed, which indeed is rather slow on long tracks, compared to (inaccurate) MP3 seeking.

Oops (again!). That could be solved with different container indeed.

I don't quite understand the approach to codec choice problem using platform support. Today MPC does not enjoy enormous hardware compatibility but there's a MPC decoder for any platform we could have a compiler for. It's not really MPC's (or any other codec's) problem if they are not supported on a given platform, rather it is the lack of documentation provided about the platform by the manufacturer (proprietary vs. open discussion again). Soon enough I bet the portable audio players will become so sophisticated that we could compile our own software/plugins for them. I agree that in a few years AAC will take off but so will the Pocket PC like portable audio players onto which the developers on HA could port the current software.

And when all this is happening we'll have more storage available. In 10 years I don't think I'd be using lossy for home with my xx terabyte storage, but for my portable I guess I'd still be able to use my current MPC archive. Thus my effort to rip in MPC was not in vain.

So the question is which encoder, at the bitrate you're aiming for, captures more quality. At high bitrates MPC and AAC are contenders. MP3 is known to be technically inferior. AFAIK so is Ogg Vorbis because Menno once stated its toolset was a subset of AAC so it could not theoretically offer better quality with the same amount of tuning. But today I think MPC is better tuned than AAC, it is also faster to encode and decode.

It is not logic, but psychology. To some degree or another, we all follow the mantra: 'I want to use newer technology'. We might jump to new codecs that are experiencing heavy development and frequent releases, but then cannot stand the thought of having files encoded with older, 'inferior' versions. Thus, we re-rip sizeable portions of our collections in the belief that it could net some benefit, real or perceived.

Tell me truthfully that you never felt the desire to replace at least some of your older Vorbis encodes with your own GT3?

Dunno about Garf, but I never felt the urge to replace my old files encoded with Psytel AACenc 1.2. They sound transparent to me, so why going through the hassle of re-ripping everything again?

Well, similar things apply here.

I have a collection consisting of r3mix MP3, APS MP3, MPC in all variations, Ogg in all variations, Nero AAC, and lossless.

I've been rather carefull to encode the more sensitive and precious stuff (e.g. badly scratched CDs that may not be rippable a second time) to lossless or very high bitrates.

So I don't really have a reencoding issue - it'll likely only appear when I buy a portable.