I used to be a MPC fanatic for years, but it seems to be near dead now.

Some months ago, HA community gives a brand new PC to Franck Klemm in order to « motive » it (I don't know if it's the right word). Since this day, no real news.

If I understand well, Frank Klemm doesn't want to work anymore on MPC codec.
- In this case why doesn't Frank Klemm say it ?
- Why another people canno't work on MPC ? I assume that thousands of personns works on MP3, OGG or AAC... It's not a critic (I'm far away to be able to work on such delicate problem), but why 2 or 3 people don't work on MPC in order to improve is efficience ?

I don't want to be rude (if this is the case it's only due to my poor english), but I just want to know what is in fact the different between OGG and MPC : in the case of OGG, I know there are plenty of different implemention (Garf for example) which are sometimes better than "official" ones.

Frank never said a thing about giving up mpc. Have a look at musepack.net. He is working on musepack 1.2 / SV7.5.. Guess its ready when its ready. Search the forum and the answers are there. Thousands don't work on the other codecs and no one understands mpc apart from klemm or bushmann.

Vorbis is a good encoder at all bitrates, mpc is optimised for speed, low cpu overhead and transparent encoding around 170k

That's a shame !
In fact only Klemm or Bushmann can work on MPC ?

Not so. The computer was given to Frank Klemm as an expression of appreciation for all his past efforts on behalf of the audio community, even if another line of code was never going to be written.

Regards,
Madrigal

Sorry, I misunderstood that.

Also, most of the development tasks do not happen on this forum, but instead somewhere else. So, if you're interested in active mpc-development, then this forum is the wrong place to search for it.

What you will find in this forum concerning MPC will probably only be big news, like the release of a new version. Or MPC getting hardware support *hint, hint*

- Lyx

Hrm... I think that's arguable at best.

Quoting CiTay's original post announcing the fund:



So, even though the main reason for the donations might have been thanking him for his past achievements, people also expected to motivate him (or make him feel guilty) so that he continues his work on MPC.

You assumption is wrong.


Plenty?

I'd say plethora of implementations as compared to mpc/wma.
This is getting off-topic. I'll just say that it would be nice to see some progress on mpc.

What I was trying to emphazise was that there are not that many people who know audio compression.
There are even less willing to work on open source projects during their spare time.
There are even less willing to work on mpc.

No. Though you would probably only need a few hands to count the people able to work on a lossy codec.

But as Gabriel showed there are more than ability that keeps people from developing mpc.

edit: and it is not that long ago that mpc went open source.

Sure we hoped to motivate him with the PC. And i think we achieved that. I thought i mentioned before that he is working on MPC 1.20 at the time, which will be the final SV7 version. Yes, there has been delay due to trouble with Linux and an issue concerning the company he works at (see here). Still, we didn't pressure him, or make him "feel guilty"; that's not our intention. In his last mail, he told me he is testing all the small modifications and he searches for an error that causes access failures sometimes. He admits he underestimated the effort a bit.

But you guys need to stop worrying so much. There is no money behind it other than the donation money for the PC. If you want to read something worrying, read this.

The guy in the article is right. Anyway, please don't take it as a criticism, but Xiph haven't been doing much lately. Ok, ok, they've just released the Theora specs. But still, not as fast as they did before.

Does people really expect F. Klemm to achive serious improvents on MPC in 2-4 months after he picked the ball up again...? I'm not a programmer, but I know things take time in actual life, so better give the man a break, it's hardly realistic to expect revolutionary progress or groundbreaking news in such a short time...

Just my 2 øre (or cents or whatever....)

I am... and would tend to agree. Especially given the comlexity and part time nature of the work (he has to work to eat after all). Besides... MPC is still very good.

Just picking up on the number of developers for Ogg Vorbis, the only main and core developer (who knows every single line of the source code) is Monty and he's been rather inundated with other projects like Postfish and now OggFile. The other "active" third party developers include aoyumi, nyaochi, and myself but we (at least for me, I can't speak for aoyumi and nyaochi) all have other main commitments and Vorbis is certainly not our main priority. I guess open source projects rely a lot on how much spare time and motivation the developers have since they are volunteering. So Vorbis is probably in no better shape (in terms of development) than MPC....certainly when we compare with AAC development which has plenty of hands who most are actually getting paid to do it

Basically what I want to say is....patience is a virtue.

Sorry to ask but why does MPC just go straight to SV8, and skip the SV7 and SV7.5?

I think Ogg Vobris is great, but i don't like Xiph so MPC is the way to go.

For years we are waiting for SV8...




ok ok...
I was afraid that mpc was dead, but I see plenty of people who are convinced that I just have to be patient

My own take on this. I was in contact with Frank to work on MPC some months ago. Then both of us went in vacation... Back from vacation I tried to contact him a few times and never got a single answer from him. I can understand the man is busy. But he expressed the need for help (even though I'm really to busy to have time to work this way) and now won't even reply to me for no apparent reason. That's really not a mature attitude IMO.

Yeah i know. He doesn't reply to all my mails either. Maybe it has to do with him being on a modem line and getting 200 mails a day or so. I know he has a spam filter, but i can somehow understand that he doesn't reply to every mail...

One thing I take offence at is people who take offence to unanswered emails
(Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, its not meant to be)

I too am on a modem line at home, if I couldnt answer personal email at work, 1% would get a reply

People are God-damned busy. Things take a long long time. And no amount of banter will speed them up. People have bought me stuff so that I can do things for them, and with the best will in the world, those things dont just happen straight away

That's the point I think.



I know I know...

But I was just wondering if I should expect more, or if F Klemm has decided to stop is job (really really great job).

If this is the case : he should say to us, and we would thank him for the great past job he has made.

Just want to know.

Would you rather have Frank answering emails or working on mpc?

...... yeah, i know very well how time consuming simple organisation matters can become, even the daily mail.

Speaking of Frank, he has always been quite lazy about answering emails, we all know that. In fact, i am extremely happy that he is talking to CiTay on a regular basis now, and that there even seems to be some progress on MPC, even a very slow one.

Lets all try to be patient, hopefully all the effort with the donation has not been in vain, we'll see.

As someone who's written a little bit of open-source software I can understand how insulting it can be for a developer to be told how he should spend his own free time writing code to give away.

That said, I really feel like Xiph is losing the plot a little bit these days. AAC is quickly gaining momentum and, at the current rate, will have such a headstart that Vorbis will never catch up. Theora and Blockfish are cool but it's hard to see Vorbis languish while the other projects move forward.

I personally am very grateful for all of the work that Frank Klemm has put into Musepack as it is my lossy audio of choice. Any work that he takes the time to do is very gratefully appreciated because after all this is just a side project for him and not how he makes his living. I wish I'd been a member of HA when donations were being taken for his PC, but I too view that as just our way of showing our appreciation for what he's done and not pressuring him into doing more. I'd love to see SV8 but SV7 is so good now that if he stopped I'd still be perfectly happy with Musepack.

Unfortunately my program knowledge base is rather lacking so all I can do is test (when I get better at it). Really it's not musepack's lack of development that bothers me it's Xiph's work on vorbis. They are really slacking and all of the work on Vorbis lately has been by third parties. Not that that's a bad thing but if they're not careful AAC will catch them in performance on listening tests.