MPC q8 or aac 320kbps, for home use mainly, and will transcode to lame aps lately for portable machine.
which one is better? and i also cocern to buy a hd portable player, so, i would like to have some opinion.

thx

I believe that most of the people that will respond to this post will probably tell you to ABX test the two formats, athough at that level they should be about equal quality wise and also rather transparent, so neither one is nessicerily better than the other. Though, with MPC being VBR you might save some space here and there.. *shrugs* I don't really know..

And for the HD MP3 player, I suggest the Creative Zen Touch. A good player and one that has a nice warm sound to it.. plus it's about like $50(I believe) cheeper than most other MP3 HD players at that size... But if you're planning on going with AAC, why not just get an iPod so you don't have to transcode to MP3 later?

If you want to transcode to lame from your encoded files you should stick to a lossless format like wavpack, flac or monkeyaudio. Transcoding from lossy to lossy will always decrease quality. But if you strictly want to save disc space, try wavpacks hybrid mode with 384kbps or optimfrog dualstream quality 6. Both should be save enough for later transcoding to lame without causing audible artifacts.
If you want to use your encodings on a portable player without transcoding to lame, you should encode to aac, according to its better hardware support atm.

This listening test by ol' golden ears himself, guruboolez, may be of use - although the bitrates used are slightly lower than your suggestions.

MPC appears to do best in the test.

Lossless would obviously be best, if you can afford the hard drive space or optical media.

hmmm, above 300kbs Wavpack performed best in Guruboolez' TranscodingTest and he did not even tried the x-switch!
I would not consider using aac(iTunes) above 192kbs (unless you buy an iPod). Musepack is better tuned for higher bitrates whereas aac(iTunes) is probably at is best at 128kbs. I can't ABX MPC at -q6 but aac at 256kbs.

It seems you still are not tied to codec and player. So you can try Rio Karma or iRiver iHP players (IMHO excellent players which can playback Vorbis files. By the way Rio Karma can even playback gaples) + Ogg Vorbis -q6. You do not need to transcode and will save lot of storage.

today i made a test by myself, i use an akg k271 & throught the output of my pc to mini component; Sound Samples are flac, aac 320cbr, aac 320var, mpc q8;

in my system, flac only a little bit better than the others, and after that, i can't hear the difference of mpc q8 & aac 320;

the advantage of mpc is the time of encode faster than the aac, the size is a little bit smaller than aac. but in the compatible side, it is a losser, it only can use in pc, after that, no any portable machine can support that ...

i think i will keep in the format of aac var (nero encode), the disadvantge is it need a lot of time to encode.

thx for everybody opinion.

Sorry, but can you really recognize (i.e., ABX) flac and mpc q8 ? I lost since yesterday at least few hours trying to ABX mpc --braindead vs. loseless, and yes I failed miserably ;-)

By the way, did anybody ever succeeded to ABX mpc --braindead on normal music?

Regards