Which stuff does still have to be improved on MPC? will the quality improve much in the near future?

I don't think anything really needs to be improved on as in the case of there being some sort of pathological weakness of the format. 99.9% of the clips out there, even the extremely difficult ones, usually encode transparently with either mpc -standard or -xtreme. Buschel himself has even said that the psymodel is "basically finished". Of course there may be possible tweaks here and there which could further reduce bitrate while maintaining quality (I think Frank may be looking into a few things), but that isn't related to a deficiency in quality, only a possible increase an efficiency. This is mostly theoretical though as MPC is already very efficient.

As for other things, MPC will be improving in the area of bitstream robustness and error recovery, encoding speed (with the addition of SSE/2 and 3dnow! code), and perhaps a few other areas like the ability to encode multichannel files as well as supporting a wider range of sampling rates, and the addition of a new native tagging system. I believe some of these things should be included in the SV8 MPC bitstream revision which should be out sometime in the coming months.



I doubt it. There's really not much room left for quality improvements (at least of anything remotely considered significant) since the current encoder already provides such a high rate of transparency to the vast majority of people on nearly all signals.

hmm, i am thinking of ripping my collection to MPC and everything has to be perfect. Do you suggest i do it right away or wait for SV8?

That depends on how long you can wait. I don't think SV8 will be out for a few months. However, SV8 is mostly only going to offer functionality improvements so unless you specifically need those (different sampling rate support or something else) you might as well go ahead.

what exactly is different smapling rate?

Say like you needed to encode a file at 22.5khz instead of 44.1khz (CD). For encoding CDs, this is totally irrelevant.

Say like you needed to encode a file at 22.05khz instead of 44.1khz (CD). For encoding CDs, this is totally irrelevant.

one more thing... what about ide tagging in MPC. Is it possible or not. Do you recommend tagging?

Yes, id3 tagging is fine as long as it is id3 v1.1. You can actually tag MPC with id3v2 but the current MPC players do not support it yet and I think with SV8, MPC will be using a custom tagging format.

If I were encoding albums now, I'd just tag with id3v1.1.

There is plugin for winamp that supports mpc files with id3v2, by ignoring id3v2 tags, they aren't used. However you can't seek in files with id3v2.
Url for tagger that includes this plugin is http://orlsoft.km.ru/osmpx_eng.asp

Buschel promissed that he will make plugin that will alow seeking few months ago...

If somebody would implement id3v2 tag support for winamp and sv7, it would be very easy to again implement it with sv8 when it comes out.

Probably best thing would be id3v2 wraper for winamp3 and/or winamp2, something like wa2 wraper for wa3. Then any tagger could be used and winamp could play any files with id3v2.

There is plugin for winamp that supports mpc files with id3v2, by ignoring id3v2 tags, they aren't used. However you can't seek in files with id3v2.
Url for tagger that includes this plugin is http://orlsoft.km.ru/osmpx_eng.asp

Buschel promissed that he will make plugin that will alow seeking few months ago...

If somebody would implement id3v2 tag support for winamp and sv7, it would be very easy to again implement it with sv8 when it comes out.

Probably best thing would be id3v2 wraper for winamp3 and/or winamp2, something like wa2 wraper for wa3. Then any tagger could be used and winamp could play any files with id3v2.