As per Frank's request, we've created several web-based tools that allow developers and users to interact and communicate in a way that allows healthy and productive development of the format. We're attempting to route all projects related to MPC through the new site, and it's a good opportunity to announce it officially.

The Musepack site now contains an easy to navigate main page, a lightweight and fast forum to allow input from all users and a samples database, to help with tests of all codecs.

Participation and input from the advocates and users of the format is necessary in order for the whole project to succeed. We have the capacity to handle more traffic, and we eagerly await each and every possible contribution from you. Musepack needs more listening tests, more feedback regarding quality/bugs, and most importantly, co-operation from programmers writing plug-ins and programs that support MPC.

As shown on the current poll Roberto created, almost a third of you chose MPC over all other formats. It's a good indication that there is a lot of interest in the format and that you still find it the best for your needs. We'll be glad to see your enthusiasm translated into support of the new direction we're going. We'll also accept criticism regarding any element of the site that you think we can improve.

http://www.musepack.net

Best regards,
~ Florian

looks good

I like the new site. Hopefully new versions of Musepack will come soon. I really like the format but it's falling behind as Vorbis keeps getting better and better. Still, the new site design is really nice.

I really dont understand why MPC needs a forum of its own. This must be a slap in the face of the admins of HA.org, IMO. I also want to point out that i had no idea about this, nor did it get my approval.

Yes, corecodec. com is suffering from big problems ( mainly hosting, also real and sever RL issues for some fo the founders ) and there was maybe not enough support form our side for the project recently. But i dont think we deserve that now all of a sudden, even without being informed, some people amongst the musepack fans make their own thing completely.

Besides that, the webiste looks very nice.

Christian
former MPC project admin ( retired )
matroska project admin

questions...

1. old one: is it clear what kind of license the mpc encoder is/will be using?
2. new one: is that really the best logo you could came out with?

How is that a slap in the face of HA admins if I got personally invited for admin position there as well ?

You distribute LGPL and GPL compiled softwares. But you don't give any link to download the sources. IMO that's a violation of the license that you should resolve.

Other than that, Christian the Musepack guys even tested their site on our Matroska server and given the semi-legal aspect of Musepack, it may be better not to put it on Corecodec. Dunno where the changes to the sources are published, though...

Let me answer a points raised there as there a few confusions:

LGPL doesn't force you to provide links to sources, BUT to give sources to anyone asking for it. Anyway, it's has never been an issue since those sources have always been shared as a package on the site. The link is on the first page in the last box at musepack.net. Sources for plugins are also offered as links. The only thing that *could* be missing is the audition filter sources, but that will be resolved soon. You should have looked more carefully robux4 before accusing us.

About the CC / musepack, since April, i have seen only delays. I, and other people, thought it was better to actually have a website and development instead of waiting for something that could be delayed again. Same for HA, Ganymed offered his listening samples page a long time ago. The wiki is currently dead. Let's wait another six months / years ?

Now we don't have any cvs currently. I thought CC would still host this. But if this the kind of attitude i deserve from you all right now, i just guess i'll skip it for a while.

I absolutely don't care for politics and just wanted a working website. Now it is done and i'm happy with it.

Agreed.

Give it a rest. A lot of those binaries were available before MPC was open-sourced. The page is wrong when it mentions the license.

Oh, and there's a source-code link on the front page as well.

After all the effort Christian put in into trying to kick start work on MPC again, I can't understand why he wasn't informed at all about this new site. Bad form that.

Those thoughts aside, I really like the site but I think the logo is a bit Fred Flintstone.

I appreciate the effort. Considering the limited resources of such projects it's a nice and functional site. I must say it doesn't look too cool but that's fine. I like Frank Klemm's MPC site or FreeBSD/NetBSD sites for instance. They're functionality oriented but still manages to look alright to me. If this's the main focus, my humble opinion is: it's generally a good idea to refrain from logos that try to look friendly/pretty to the average user (like the Monkey's Audio logo or the current Flintstone logo of Musepack site).

Somehow I liked the futuristic look of the initial musepack.net site (the one that says "it's coming soon").



Sorry but I must disagree. Vorbis might be getting better with the latest tunings but still it's not a centralized effort. AFAIK there's no encoder that is guaranteed to give consistent results, Xiph version is very slow in terms of updates and many of the main improvements on separate trees has not been merged into the main tree. So it's as much a mess as linux distros right now. MPC on the other hand is extremely well tuned as it is and there's not so much room for improvement other than what SV8 is supposed to bring. Call me a zealot but "falling behind" does not therefore seem likely in the next decade with the current development speed of Xiph.

He was, and I have the logs to prove it ™.

As for the cascading style sheet (the green scheme), 25 IRC denizens voted in favor of it long before the choice was made. The logo was just a natural choice
to complement it. You've gotta be a little wild and whacky if you want to generate
attention. Much like with any other sort of art (and yes, a professional artist created it, with the help of Shy who added some nice touches to it afterwards).

I guess it would look nice if musepack.net could host Peter's decoding library too, not link to a temporary folder on foobar2000.org. (Link is foobar2000.org/temp/mpc.zip ATM). I guess as Peter is involved in the site he would allow this if his permit is needed

There's one thing you're forgetting though. Vorbis is actually making progress ( even if it's not at the pace you would like ). Is MPC? As far as I know, nobody has heard from Frank regarding development stuff in awhile... Does anyone know the status of what he's been working on after the PC donation?

The other part worth noting is that Vorbis still has, and will continue to probably always have more support than MPC. If the quality of Vorbis keeps improving, and things keep not happening on the MPC front, the appeal that MPC has is going to keep diminishing except for all but a few.

Another issue is that if it turns out that Frank is really just no longer interested in MPC, then what happens? I never really thought that'd be the case in the past, but I'm not so sure now (though if things are happening behind the scenes, it would be nice to know about it). At least with Vorbis we've seen that other people are willing to make at least some contributions to improve things aside from Monty.

Anyway, not to burst anyones bubble or anything. I've been a very strong supporter of MPC for a long time, but I'm not as confident in its future as I was at one point. Quality wise, MPC is great, but that's not the only thing that's important for it to continue to do well.

Right. I think there's a good momentum in the Vorbis front these days. It seems to lack a little bit of coordination esp. the involvement of the Xiph's side in terms of incorporating changes into the main tree. Some of the improvements still seem experimental although they perform well in listening tests. But at least there's active development compared to sometime ago when there was just one tree which was stalled. This is good for all of us.

On MPC front I think my demands are not much so I don't bother with the lag in development. I assume many of us only wish more hardware support and on that front there're some recent developments as we have more open platforms (like PocketPC/Palm players) that one can port the decoder to. I am sure MPC people are most confident in terms of making most of their bits at the moment: almost noone would consider reripping a part of their archive into a future version of MPC because the quality has been stable for a while. As long as I feel confident I could use the same files 10 years from now on my IA64 (availability of the decoder in many platforms), I am happy with the current lack of MPC development And Frank might still be up to something. Then again the future is lossless and we seem to be getting closer to such high capacities to make the switch (latest poll results).

I encode all my rips in mpc, but i must say that i have tested ogg vorbis and will test it some more when i have more time. I didn't test the standard 1.0.1 encoder, but the 1.1 RC1 with advanced switches and megamix2, so i don't know how the stock stable encoder behaves. If the time comes that i'm convinced that ogg vorbis will achieve the same transparancy frequency as mpc on the same bit rates, then i'll switch, because ogg vorbis does have added benefits, such as 5.1 support, matroska support and (better) portable support. Ogg vorbis isn't there yet, but it's not standing still as mpc seems to be.

Madman2003.

Let's not forget the recent PP's portable library for decoding MPC (on resource limited devices), that made possible to have support for MPC on PocketPC / WinCE platforms via BetaPlayer, a nice media player made by Picard.

Of course not. I think it's really cool that he did that. But writing an new decoder (as nice as it may be) doesn't have anything to do with the format itself, which is dictated by a specification and an encoder.

It certainly helps to allows for more widespread platform support, at least on the playback side of things though.

What I meant with the comment you quoted though was regarding fundamental improvements to the encoder, since that's what most people are waiting on after all.

Maybe someone is willing to do the same kind of thing for encoder development, but I haven't seen it (or heard about it) yet.

Edit:

And by the way, I don't mean to drag this thread off-topic or turn it into a Vorbis vs. MPC thing. The biggest question I have though, which as far as I can tell is not addressed by the posts in this thread or the site so far, is "What is the state of MPC?" It's nice to have a site dedicated to it's support and development, but it seems that addressing that question would be an important part of the effort.

Ok, understood.
I agree with you on that.



Indeed

I have no intention to turn this thread into a flame war. If it
becomes one after my post, it must be moved to off-topic or sent
to heaven right away!

Let me clarify a few things:

1. I will not allow a situation in which Ganymed takes the flak from *anyone*
here regarding the project or his post, since his initial post consisted
of words we both agreed on. It was not meant to be controversial or to
attract attention. The goal was to interest a small group of MPC users,
but a quick admin/mod on HA moved it to the news section seconds after
it was posted, and we had no control over it.

2. Frank Klemm is very much alive, but he posts to another forum. I'm sad
that this is the situation, but maybe he simply doesn't feel comfortable
with HA and/or the huge amount of attention from HA's members. CiTay,
Ganymed and I have contacted him several times. CiTay had just a little
bit more luck, and Frank's latest update was that he was working on the
new encoder. It was 1.5 months ago, and there is a valid reason for
anyone to be sceptic about it all, but he did not indicate that he's no
longer interested in development.

3. If any of you feel the need to pick a voodoo doll to shoot arrows
of accusations at, hit *me*. Chris soberly picked me as the guy to
replace him, and although I hate the politics behind this audio community
(not necessarily HA) and I'd rather not have a title at all, I took
the position and I'll handle any complaint anyone has about our decisions.

4. We are a team of 4 members and a few others who help and motivate us.
We did not intend for anyone to be offended. We acted precisely as expected,
asking for permission to handle the older site (April 2004), permission to
manage it ourselves (June 2004), and permission to contact the actual owner
of the musepack.net domain (July 2004). We evaluated a few hosts before we
landed on the one that impressed us the most. That does not mean we don't
thank the Matroska people (especially robUx4) for allowing us to evaluate
their new server, but it means we made a choice (a German host) based on
what we thought was the best for the community, and we're extremely happy
with our choice.

5. I thank the patient admins of HA for allowing the thread to be posted and
accumulate such a large amount of off-topic responses. I thank Chris and CiTay
for their patience and willingness regarding the "PC for Klemm" project. I have
nothing personal against anyone. I just want the 2 forums to co-exist, and
there's absolutely no reason for it not to happen.

Nice post Seed.

Two thoughts:

-1/ the look of the site/forum is nice in my opinion. Doesn't look like hi-tech like an alien spaceship, but something could be nice without it

-2/ I'm glad to see that there's another place to discuss about musepack. As far as I know, HA.org was not designed to be a monopolistic board about modern audio formats. Without HA.org, musepack would probably be an unknown format for most of us. Therefore, www.musepack.net could be considered as the fruit of HA.org attitude toward modern audio format and rules about audio quality statement. In other words, it sounds more like an accomplishment than a danger or a slap

Its maybe time for some apology from my side.

It seems i overreacted when i saw there was another forum for MPC, and for a couple of reasons :

First, i really had no clue there was a new forum planned. But of course, i agreed that Seed and Lefungus become new project admins for MPC, and as a result of that i have to accept that they will lead the project different than i would do, and be it with a new forums.

Second, i was really afraid about the reactions of JohnV and Dibrom on this. MPC owes EVERYTHING it is to HA.org IMO, without the feedback of the users on HA.org and the work of all the developers hanging out here, i dont feel it would be used by such a big number of people.

Third, as you know we all put a lot of effort into building up corecodec.org as a free multimedia focussed opensource development community. We were glad and proud when Frank decided that corecodec.org would become the official host for the MPC sources, once it will go completely opensource.
The community is still growing, we have TTA hosted there now and also ( hopefully ) Wavpack, Betaplayer, matroska ( of course ), CoreAAC, CoreVorbis, and hopefully there are more to come.

However, we were extremely unlucky with our hosting during the last months. In less than 1 year we basically had 3 different, but dedicated servers on which the community was hosted on ( you need root access to the server for the installation GForge, the sf.net like platform ), and we were constantly suffering from hardware failures, DoS attacks ( from VERY STRONG lines BTW ) and other shit. Sometimes we all feel like Sissyphos, the Greek hero who had to roll the stone up to the hill all the time, just to see it rolling down on the other side immediately after arrival on the hill.

When MPC should become hosted on corecodec.org as a project, i was talking to JohnV how he would feel about a MPC section on the 'official' corecodec.org Forums on http://www.corecodec.com, and he wasnt all too pleased. So i gave up on this idea, although we had hoped that this section on the forums would have attracted a lot of new users, and thus could have helped the whole community.

Maybe this was the reason why i overreacted so much when i learned about the new forums, outside of HA.org and not on corecodec . Once again i saw one of my stones rolling down on the other side of the hill .......

Well, for the record, I wasn't aware of the new forums either (I don't have much time for idling on IRC these days..). At least, if someone told me at some point, I don't remember it. I don't think JohnV knew either, though it is possible. Peter obviously knew since he said he was invited to be an admin there.

Anyway, I have a few other bits I'd like to mention related to some of this at some point, but for the moment, they'll have to wait until another time...

Seed: I agree with many of your points, thanks for the elucidation.

ChristianHJW thanks for coming back with your post too.

Nice site

(but a target="_blank" @ the links in the news would be good)

This form of linking is not valid xhtml, which is probably why it isn't used.

I guess the Musepack letters are made out of tree branches & leaves because of the living audio compression saying, maybe an old looking tree next to it?

You can do:



And it will still be valid XHTML.

Ganymed, Seed and the others, thank you for your continuous productiveness, it's really appreciated.

An update on the situation with Frank: Apparently he was in England (i don't know if for vacation or from work) but he's back now. I got a reply from him today that he'll be reading some previous mails now, and once i get an answer on that, things should be clearer. Also, he told me that his uni-jena.de mail account is essentially nuked because of a spamflood. He will not read/reply to any mails that landed there.

I'd like to mention 3 things:

1. The team is Shy, Lefungus, Ganymed, Seed. m0rbidini deserves special thanks, as well as Volcano. We do work *very* hard, almost around the clock, but we get along very well and we feel very productive.

2. None of us is gonna hang a poster with the Musepack logo in our living room, but time was very short and we had to move on quickly, so it's what we picked. We *might* ask for submission of a new logo in a few months. If a better logo is submitted to us in the future and it matches the current background color and size (pixels as well as KB), we'll consider accepting it to replace the current one. We'll ask members of HA to submit some, but not right now. There are many more important things first.

3. We've created a small poll to ask which lossless format to use for the samples database. Since the database is NOT for MPC users only, we'd like one of the HA mods/admins to duplicate it on HA and the combined results of both polls will determine which format to go with. Anyone?

Is there much to discuss regarding the format to use?
Last time a database was discussed it seemed clear that FLAC was the only good choice since it is well supported.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=18902

My opinion: Since currently MPC seems to be quite dead and despite of numerous rumors of the on going development nothing really has happened, if a site like musepack.net can help MPC to bring back to life, it can only reflect positively on HA as well, what comes to MPC.
I don't remember this discussion but I certainly havent insisted anything what corecodec should or should not do(?), and I doubt my opinion would matter anyway to corecodec. I may have asked if it is wise or not, but I don't remember.
What I remember is that you announced the MPC corecodec project, you said that there will be MPC mailing lists (which I linked to) and web forums will continue on HA. I don't remember I really had anything else to say except "ok".

For musepack.net I wish all the good in the efforts of trying to revive MPC. I think HA has made some efforts on that already, like collecting money for Frank's new PC, so it's good if other instances try as well. But at this point I don't get my hopes up until I really see some definite new development on MPC.

There seems to be a problem with the domain musepack.net. If any of you want to visit the site, you can temporarily use http://mpc.anytag.de/

Thanks

... i had no problems with the website, not at all. I dont have the time to care about it, so i was more than happy that Seed and Lefungus would take on this job, and created one. Phase has done a lot of work on an old site already, but the guys started from scratch ( maybe because Phase's HTML was not accessable when cc.org was down ), but thats ok with me.
... ???? First, your opinion DOES matter to us, same for Dibrom. Corecodec and HA.org admin team always had a very good relationship, and i certainly wont ever do something to screw this.
Second, I know for sure we were talking about adding a MPC section on the corecodec.com forums, and your thoughts on that were that it wasnt at all necessary, and could only lead to confusion and scattering of information to various places, and i fully agree on this point of view.
... ... i should read fully what other people are writing before replying ... yes, thats basically the same i can remember, you didnt think this would bring any good, so we dropped the idea and agreed to have a dedicated MPC Sector on HA.org instead.
... you did say more than 'ok', and it was a friendly, constructive and positive conversation. I didnt ask you for 'allowance', we talked about what would be best for MPC and Corecodec. Thats it.
..... agreed. CiTay is the man ... Frank likes him, he helped Frank a lot, and Frank is extremely happy with his new PC. I stepped back a bit, i had the feeling my constant calls asking for results did put Frank a lot under pressure, leading to the opposite. So, again, CiTay is da man ...... if anybody will motivate Frank to develop MPC further, its him ......

Sorry for the off-topic post but I'd like to share what I've found since this post. My solution above is problematic with some browsers as the new window maynot have any scroll bars (IE 6).

What I now do is this-
Add between your <head></head> tags.

Create a file called external.js, paste this into file


Your typical link would be:


This information came from here.