MPC is Musepack
one of the best lossy codec based on MP2 (PAM2).

IMO better than AAC.

check out http://www.personal.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/

Mmmmm... and what if you use more than one?

I use MPC for listening on the PC / Backup / Archival and MP3 LAME for my portable player. My vote has gone for the latter.

However, I believe AAC is going to be the next best thing. It's surprising how few people have voted it.

the poll is from October 2001

My choice has been APE for some time now, but starting to look OFR and FLAC now as well. I only use mp3 or Ogg Vorbis when the file will go on my website and I want to save bandwidth and time for people with slow connections. I do have an entire Bing Crosby LP (162 MB) stashed on my main site somewhere in the Ape format though.

Those who voted OGG, what are you encoding at? I do q=1 for spoken word and q=10 for all music.

q5 with GT3

IMO, there's no reason to go above q6 or 7... above that it's just bitrate bloat.

new guy here.

Ripping cd's with EAC, encoding them with MonkeyAudio's external feature using Lame 3.94 with the following command line:

-ms -q0 --vbr-new -V0 -b192 -F --lowwpass 19.7 --noasm mmx --noasm 3dnow --noasm sse
(Am I doing something wrong here? quality is what i want)

For playing i use WinAmp 2.91 with the MAD plugin on a M-Audio Revolution 7.1 soundcard. Hifi-set: tube pre amp, tube mono amp's with Siltech and Van Den Hul wiring and Epos speakers.

But as i said: I am new to this forum and i hope to learn a lot

New guy,
Check out the MP3 Forum on this site - it will give you recommendations for best use of LAME.

Long story short:
Use recommended LAME compile 3.90.3 using commandline: -preset <name>, where name = standard, extreme or insane depending on how much bandwidth you want to allocate (in increasing order, approx. 192kbps VBR, 240kbps VBR and 320kbps CBR). These are all highly tuned and tested settings with optimizations not available via command line. Trust them, they will work better than any commandlines (like yours).

For playback, many here use Foobar2000 (see FB2K link at top of page), but a properly setup WinAMP 2.91 works fine too.

MPC --standard
for archiving and listening...

I chose Ogg Vorbis.

I encode at -q 5 using GT3b1 for my music and -q 1 using Xiph.org for audio in my DVD rips.

Just ripped both CDs in the Sinatra 80th - All the Best set to wavs with EAC (just DLed that yesterday to try it out) and did some playing around to find the best balance for format/speed/size. Still using dbPowerAMP for all my conversion aside from the few OFR files I have made.
A master 39.5 MB wav file (4:04 length):
using Ape @ extra high - 10.7 MB, 6 seconds encoding
using flac @medium - 11.309 MB, just past 4 seconds encoding
using flac @high - 11.587 MB, 50 seconds encoding

Wow two people voted VQF, thats craziness.

Don't forget that this poll started in october 2001. That's like a very long time ago regarding audio compression.
I guess these two people are using another codec now or were just kidding.

The Love Bloat!

ogg @ -q 8 for me B)

xen-uno

I voted for MPC, but I use LAME 3.90.3 (mp3) too.
MPC: for archiving and PC listening.
MP3 (--aps): for portable use.
MP3 (--ap cbr 192 lowpass 18 khz): at job (I work in a FM radiostation, the software that we use for automation only works fine with mp3 cbr ).
My most of my friends still use mp3 at 128 kbs. They said that is "transparent" at 128 kbs.

I voted for lossless, since my primary listening format is FLAC (as of recently), but I also use MP3 (LAME 3.90.3, --alt-preset cbr 128) for my portable devices.

No surprise, based on what I've read, that MPC is in the lead here, but I *was* surprised to see that Ogg Vorbis isn't practically tied with MP3, since it's such a great format too. But I guess hardware support is still an issue. Or maybe it's because this poll is 2 yrs old, started long before Garf's GT3b1 libs existed...

-q6 using GT3b1

I can fit about as many FLAC albums on a DVD as MPC --insane albums on a CD-R. I have lots of albums archived with MPC, but when doing new encodes I'm all FLAC.

AAC,HE-AAC to be precise.

-Tuning