My apologies to those of you who also read the chaostar MPC phorum at http://www.chaostar.org/phorum/list.php?f=1 where I've already posted these questions. Trying to cover all the bases, ya know.

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Sorry for the scattershot approach here folks but I've been out of the loop for a few months now and am just now getting back to encoding.

1. Are there any quality differences between Frank Klemm's encoders/decoders and Andre's originals or is it just a matter of speed?

2. What's the difference between v1 and v2 of the 90i encoder? I've read on the Project Mayhem board that there were occasional differences in resultant file sizes. See http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showth...s=&threadid=313

3. How does one use the replaygain.exe? Has anyone written a front end for it?

4. And lastly, always the big question, favorite switches? I'd been using -xtreme with Andre's last encoder and was delighted with the quality. I recently read a note by Dibrom saying he prefered -xtreme -nmt 10 for most encoding (and I trust his ears since I've been using his Lame compiles on the occasion I need to MP3 something for a client).

As always, many thanks in advance.


ears

Frank's decoder is slightly more accurate which could theoretically translate to increased quality, though pratically you'd never notice the difference.

See his page here:

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

Under the precision part for the decoder.

At any rate, both Frank's encoder and decoder should be used over any of the other versions. Not only are they significantly faster, they are more up to date, have had more small bug fixes, are more feature rich, etc.



Here is a direct quote from Frank:





I'll have to check on this because I haven't tried it. I think it's fairly simple though, if I don't have a chance to try it out in time I'm sure JohnV can answer this instead since I know he's used it already.



Well MPC doesn't really need to be tweaked with long drawn out command line switches as with something like LAME, so there's really not much to change. The default presets are quite excellent. As you say, sometimes I prefer a slightly higher nmt value (9 is the default with xtreme) but keep in mind this is with very harsh music (as far as encoding difficulty) also. I'd say just use -xtreme most of the time (-standard is really good also, add -ltq fil if you use it for a slightly lower ath at a minimal cost in bitrate) and if you want a little bit higher quality and don't mind the bitrate, just go for -insane.

Dibrom,

When you say 'harsh' music in terms of encoding, are you refering to something like metal or electronica or could it be any type of music that for some reason is just difficult for the encoder to handle? I've noticed that well recorded acoustic guitars panned hard left or right seem to get artifacted to some degree with most mp3 encodings.

BTW, thanks for doing such a great job with your presets. I'm an audio engineer myself with a busy schedule and I rarely have 'extra' time to do in depth listening tests. When your first set of presets came out I quickly A/B'd them to the FGH encoding I'd been using and they blew it away. It's great to be able to send a client a rough mix quickly over the net and let them get 95% of the picture. Keep up the good work.


ears

There's a new versions in this zip file: http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/bin/mppdec-windows-0.98w.zip

Also new instructions about replaygain.exe
http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/#replaygain