Taking into account everything I've read on this site in the past 3 weeks, I must say I'm impressed with the wealth of knowledge this site holds overall. Dibrom especially, but I know there are countless others.

I'm very interested in getting my entire CD collection archived in some format or another, and I'm very anal about the quality. I really want to go with MPC from the get go, but something keeps stopping me. I keep thinking about "scene acceptance" and "popularity" of the format, and so on. What would happen to the MPC format if Frank stopped doing active development on it? Since it's not open source it can't just be picked up and modified like Lame...I really think MPC would gain much more users if it was able to be tweaked and tuned by people who had the means to.

Any opinions on the future of MPC compared to AAC, Ogg, etc? I'm looking for what you think the lifespan of these formats are. I know it's all relative and things evolve, but overall generally.

Jason

Glad to hear that you've found the site useful

QUOTE

I'm very interested in getting my entire CD collection archived in some format or another, and I'm very anal about the quality.  I really want to go with MPC from the get go, but something keeps stopping me.  I keep thinking about \"scene acceptance\" and \"popularity\" of the format, and so on.  What would happen to the MPC format if Frank stopped doing active development on it?  Since it's not open source it can't just be picked up and modified like Lame...I really think MPC would gain much more users if it was able to be tweaked and tuned by people who had the means to.

A few issues to consider here:

1. MPC is already extraordinarily high quality. There are [b]very few samples where it has "problems" with (just look how difficult it is to find a sample which causes problems for it), or that are not transparent to most people. For that reason alone, it will probably remain among the highest quality, if not *the* highest quality, encoder for a very long time, even if development stopped tomorrow. As a format in this situation, it doesn't really need much tweaking at this point.

2. Frank actually isn't the only one working on it to my knowledge. I believe there are others helping, and there may even be more coming.

3. Mainstream usage and high quality do not always mix.. MPC is an example of that. It is a format that aspires to go the extra mile in quality (and achieves this), but it doesn't necessary try to be the most accessable or widespread format. For that matter, it's going to be a very long time before anything overtakes MP3 in shear popularity. Hoping for this to happen with MPC is probably unrealistic from the start.

4. More developers do not necessarily equal higher quality, faster, or more functional releases. Now, nothing against the LAME team, but look at how many developers there are for this project and the relative development pace and release rate compared to MPC, AAC (PsyTEL), or Vorbis. In the case of LAME, hardly anyone is working on LAME anymore on a real regular basis. There are all kinds of features needed and discussed that are still missing (adaptive lowpass, nogap support, replay gain analysis, non-linear psymodel, better tonality estimation, intensity stereo, etc, etc) and that we may never even see.. even though the entire project is open source, and there are nearly 30 registered "developers". That's not saying that quality isn't pretty good right now, and that I don't think it's worth continuing to improve it myself, but I'm just trying to make a point.

With the other codecs, they are all manned by 1 or 2 people usually (in the case of Vorbis, its pretty much Monty who does all of the actual encoder work) and the results are very good. Releases usually come fairly timely, development goes along at a steady pace, and quality for all of those formats are quite high. In my experience, more people on a project do not necessarily lead to a better end result at all. That's not to say that I don't believe in Open Source, but I don't know if MPC going open source would instantly make things better somehow either.



I think MPC is going to actually be picking up in development more over time, but it's mostly going to be from a usability point of view.. quality improvements at this point are probably not going to be significant. This is simply because the quality is already so high there isn't really a whole lot that can actually be improved upon. Once you achieve transparency, what more can you do?

AAC is probably going to be around for a long time, and will probably be used in a lot of consumer electronics and broadcasting services and stuff. Ogg... who knows, maybe it will replace MP3

MPC is probably always going to be a little bit less mainstream than most formats, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. You just have to make sure you are using it for the right reasons (quality) and not the wrong ones (popularity).

That's my take on it at least..

Hello Jason, hey I am in the same boat as you, I am looking to completely digitizing my CD collection so I will be able to play my CD without lugging countless CDs around, I am also worried in my particular choice of encoder and which one provides the best quality. But having been on this forum browsing thru past posting, Dibrom has mentioned that the MPC format is literally finished quality wise, and that any improvement will be made to the efficiency of the coder (eg. lowering the bitrates).

My suggestion to you do download the latest MPC Encoder, and use that to archive your music, and to use this command switch "mppenc -xtreme -v" this will provide at least 99.9999% transperancy.

MPC needs no more teaking, and thats the beauty of it it is easy to use, unlike LAME where we need people such as Dibrom to provide users with a preset that will guarantee quality, whereas MPC the user literally needs to know "nothing" about audio coding to be able to achieve a high quality encoding, as the default switches provide the encoded files with 99.99% quality (therefore its just "mppenc src-file.wav tgt-file.mpc" which is easier than a commandline full of switches, this would most definetely scare many users away).

OGG and AAC, are also very excellent audio coders, but there are some minor issues with their quality when compared to MPC but most definetely (to my ears) are better than MP3. But both are still actively developed on, therefore we can expect bigger and better quality from those formats (I want OGG Audio with OGG Video ).

I hope this helps you in your decision in picking an audio coder to encode your CDs.

Also anyone elses comment would also be appreciated by me, as I am trying to further my knowledge about other encoders (OGG and AAC) progress in the quality field.

Cheers
AgentMil

Thanks guys for the responses...I do appreciate it.

AgentMil, I've actually already gone and encoded roughly 10 cds in both Lame and MPC, Lame using --alt-preset extreme and MPC using both -xtreme and -insane (just for testing to see what file size increases I can expect, and to compare size/quality to Lame). It's really nice to see that on some tracks, MPC insane is smaller than Lame extreme, and has unquestionably better quality. Remarkable in my eyes, and ears.

If AAC is surely going to take over for MP3 in the mainstream market down the road, it'll be nice to use it in portable audio devices and home entertainment systems just like MP3 can be used now. I'd really like to see most of these formats supported in devices going forward, but it seems as if MPC will take a long time to be adopted in that regard, if ever.

I think I'll play around with all of these formats for a while longer before I make up my mind. In the mean time I'll keep the gigs and gigs of LPAC compressed files on my RAID array in hibernation.

Cheers,

Jason

i wouldnt be so sure about that...

i believe i heard somewhere that andree actually has a job or has talked with people from harmon-kardon...

this may or may not lead places... but its worth a shot.

THATS actually a nice thing... Harmon-Kardon is one of the best in Hi-Fi, and they dont make concessions to quallity - only the best is good enough. And - that is what mpc wants to be, isnt it? maybe they can make it populair - at least under audiophiles... And make some money available for further development!

but he, dibrom, you dont think MPC will be improved on the quallity side??? Will SV8 be better?? and when will it be available?
As soon as it is available, I'll start archiving my collection too...

Jos