Just curious if anyone has run some serious transcoding tests already. MPC to anything else; MP3, Vorbis, AAC, you name it. I've come across posts that say if you ever have to transcode, MPC is a better choice to transcode from because it is a sub-band encoder. Same goes for WavPack and Optimfrog, though because of different reasons. I'm debating whether to move away from lossless, and go lossy now that I know so much more than I used to (especially after all the ABX testing I did last weekend). I do plan on running my own transcode ABX tests of course, and regarding this I'm also curious whether -q8 to -q10 is still considered overkill if possible future transcoding is part of the picture, and not just listening. Even at such high bitrates, MPC files would only take up a third of what my APE files do. I know hard drive space is cheap (well, sort of anyways) but it dawned on me that there really is no such thing as truly lossy as long as you have the original CD's. Plus if your going to go lossy, then you might as well go as far as you can with it. Thus the interest in MPC, with which there are also other benfits that I like as well (possible hardware support in the future *hopefully*, very low CPU usage, etc). It's a great format and I really like it (find even radio level hard to ABX some of the time).

take a look at this post by den and following.

try the search. you might find some more infos...

Yeah, I did a search first but didn't find anything conclusive regarding transcoding from MPC. Will take a closer look today. Do you know if that thread you pointed out covers WavPack 4 or was it a 3.x version? Curious because the posts are over a year old, and may not apply anymore. FWIW, I discovered (thanks to a couple months of practice) that I can ABX pretty well, and so far my discoveries pretty much mirrors the general consensus here regarding all the popular lossy codecs. MusePack is the only one that gives me real trouble, and it does so a (sometimes much) lower bitrates than the others. The primary unknown at this point is transcoding for portable usage.

Edit: Managed to read more of that thread. Hmm, maybe MPC isn't such a great choice after all, and I should perhaps stick to WavPack or DualStream as the better choice for possible future transcoding. Thanks for posting ilikedirt!

That was wavpack 3.xx in that thread. WV 4.1 is much better and you can also add the -x switch which can give even better noise shaping on some music like synth/artificial etc. That old post by Den is very important. Its the one artifact (hissing) vs many distorsions of the other normal coders which you should consider. There is stuff in transcodes that isn't in the original music. With the hybrids that stuff can be a slight amplification of existing noise - no additional banging, warbling, poping etc.

To measure transcode quality, create a lossy from wav and one from a lossy source then abx them. The lossies should be low bitrate as this masks less noise and reveals more transcoding damage.

Example: Lame -V6 mp3 abx against lame -V6 mp3 transcoded from mpc Q5

Oh man, don't do it. If you're already lossless, stay that way. It's true that if you have the original CDs you've got a lossless backup, but the problem there is the time it would take to re-rip and retag all the darn things. I've got ~2500 albums ripped to mp3. Ripping and tagging all these (I'm crazy-obsessive about my tagging) took years. As in more than one year. As in long time.

When I started none of the lossless solutions were very attractive (wavezip, anyone?). Had I been smart, I would have looked at how the wind was blowing and waited a couple years to for quality lossless tech. to arrive.

Reincoding from lossless formats stinks any way you cut it. If you've been ripping to lossless you should congratulate yourself on your forsight and buy a new harddrive.

Reencoding from lossless and transfering the tags is almost a piece of cake (presuming you invested a little time to setup foobar2k). Personal experience. Just select the tracks, right-click, Run conversion...

I have converted MPC to MP3 and WMA for my portable player (Rio Carbon). It's true that everyone will tell you to rip from lossless, and they are right, but as far as I'm concerned for the modest purposes of my portable audio player I can stand the quality lost.

The audio reproduction is most portable players usually isn't good enough for the difference to be audible, besides, the environments in which portable players are used usually don't call for transparent audio.

I do it right from Foobar 2000 (beta 10).