It would be fun..Everyone is just comparing the best MP3 encoder.
It's time to compare the best MPEG-1 audio at higher bit rates
as Layer-1 and Layer-2 is really bad at lower bit rates.
If a player supports MP3, it will also support MP1 or MP2 eventually.
For me, I felt that MP2(tooLAME) is better than MP3 (LAME) at bit rate above 192 kbit/s.
MP3 is already 9 or 10 years old but..........until today, VCD, DVD
are still using MP2 at 224 kbit/s. Why MP3 is so popular,
it's not really a good format, I would rather use MP2.........????

MP2 with tooLAME is much worse than LAME MP3 even at high bitrates. I would have thought, this would be quickly obvious when listening for a while?!



VCD is limited by its standard to MP2. DVD mostly uses AC3, which is not MP2.

I think the poll here is kind of misleading. There really are no highly tuned MP2 encoders available atm. I don't know of any MP1 encoders like this either... so what we're judging more than the absolute limits of the formats are just how well tuned their respective encoders are.

At any rate, I agree with Garf in that toolame does not sound as good as LAME.

Hmm... I've heard several people tell me they thought Layer-2 audio sounded better recently, and all I could figure out after talking with them was that they had blindly accepted something they read on the old CAD Audio page (now defunct, but it was run by K+K Research, makers of the dubious TAC/"Transparent Audio Compression" codec). If I remember correctly, the author had claimed that MP2 sounded better because of its "warmer" nature - he even went so far as to claim that QDesign's MP2 sounded the best!

Still, even if at one point MP2 had an advantage (arguable, but I won't) it has clearly been superseded at this point by LAME. MP2 is currently useful for hardware compatibility with standalone DVD/VCD players, but even that may eventually be phased out as MPEG4 compliance becomes a major selling point. The only other thing I can think of that might weigh in MP2's favor is that I think I remember reading once on this forum that MPC was (in part, at least) based on MP2 source-code (?). But even so, MPC is no longer MP2.

- M.

I think MP2 might actually have the potential to sound better at higher bitrates if properly tuned. Frank Klemm, maintainer of MPC (which is derived from MP2), has commented on this on more than one occassion. Apparently he's experimented with outputting MP2 streams from the MPC encoder (since they are fairly similar), and has said that the quality is quite good, IIRC.

As for people saying that MP2 sounds better with publically available encoders, it's probably hype. I wouldn't really make a judgement about the limits of the format one way or another though until a tuned MP2 encoder becomes available to the public.

Once, I ripped a track to MP2, then I changed them to (.mp3)
extention. No problem with mp3 players!

To be honest,I think MP2 needs higher birates than MP3 to hide most of the artefacts (MP2@192 is like MP3@128/160 for me) but I also find MP2 sounds better than MP3 at a bitrate such 224 or higher.
-MP2 has the best time resolution with MPC (even better than AAC MPEG-2).
-MP2 is very easy to edit.
-I feel MP2 sounds more natural,realisticand wider than MP3 (224 at least).

Sincerely,I prefer MP2 in terms of quality.

But it's hard to find a good encoder (sound limit-soloh-qdesign are bad), only Toolame is good to my mind when it comes to speak about software encoders...

And I'll add something to say:
I considerer NAD v0.93 one of the best player to play such a file (i'm ready to receive a lot of criticisms )with WinAmp and its MAD plugin (32bits).
Trust me or not I really NAD to play MP2 CBR files....

in short: MP2>MP3 at 224 or more ans MP3>MP2 at 192 or less !!

That would be great, I tested with my mp3-player and the one of my brother, both also plays mp2 without any problems, I didn´t even had to rename the files to mp3.
So a MusePack-MP2-Encoder would be good for high-quality-audio for most of the portable mp3-players and for HQ (S)VCD Audio! High-Quality-MusePack sound without buying new devices.
Has he already made a more-or-less working mp2-encoder?

My portable iRiver IMP-100/Rio Volt SP100/AVC Soul DMP-01 doesn't read MP2 files at all, even renaming them to .mp3. I guess that due to memory restrictions they throwed away the mp2 compatibility part.

Where do I get this NAD player ? I am eager to try it out ...

just for fun i did a brief test:
-----------------------
tooLAME version 0.2i
toolame -b320 samplename.wav
-----------------------

with the castanets sample, toolame will produce really bad sound, was able to abx even at cbr 320 kbit/s, not easy tho. (abx 12/16)

compilation sample (at cbr 320 kbit/s) abx 19/26, p=0.014 - was listening to the 1st 5 seconds. (problems seems a bit different as with other encoders, but generaly stereo errors (obviously js is not working properly), muffled sound, preecho)