Hi all,
For Jazz and Pop (songs ...), what are the best switches ?
I think to use --insane for Jazz and --standard for pop. Is it a good choice ?
P.S : I'm specially interested in an excellent switche for Jazz .
thanks.

Can you explain why using quality 5 and 7... it's quite a difference, whereas Jazz isn't really a genre that is hard to encode.
Like you suggested, just a quality setting will be probably enough... additional finetuning isn't really an issue anymore. Especially not for common genres as Jazz and Pop.
Should I suggest you to use a specific quality setting? Hmm the best choice is probably somewhere in the 5-7 range, the genre has no real impact on the required quality setting
(apart from electronica, on which I'd be more generous in allocating bits)

PS. maybe the MPC general forum is a better place for this thread. To Jcnmark I suggest to check out existing discussions of what setting to use. There has already been said so much about this (unfortunately a lot of nonsense too)

With most modern encoders you don't need different switches for different genre types. This is because these encoders operate at a signal level, not at a level where music and genre differences are discernable.

Yes, the only reason why one would do it is if you have your doubts the codec will do its work perfectly. [ Which is not easy to predict BTW...]
Anyway, we do know that the often sharp transients/effects of electronic music are a source of problems, therefore I mentioned the genre.

Thanks for your answers. I thought to use different presets because I found a few problems encoding jazz albums and never found any problem with encoding pop music. I specially have a live recording (done with a MD ) which is hard to encode. This is a live performance with just 2 sax players. It sounds good just with mpc insane. It is the reason why I stop using mp3.

Your problems might have something to do with the fact that if it was recorded on a mini-disc, it has already been lossy compressed once over with ATRAC.

I would say the recording being done on MD is exactly the cause.

And frankly, I find it rather silly to abandon one format based on the imperfection of another.

I mean, if you fill your car with diesel, you can't blame the car for running like crap and shooting blue smoke everywhere.

I just want to add that the quality of the MD recording is very good. It's just after encoding that I have problems. So, in order to encode these Minidisc recordings, which MPC preset should I choose ?

well, I don't really know (I haven't any experience with the quality of MD/ATRAC).

Just bear in mind that converting one lossy recording (MD means ATRAC) into another lossy format (MPC) is a bad thing. They gave it a special name ('Transcoding') but they had better chosen another word, since many people find it too difficult to understand/care about... Result = transcoding is being done all the time.
Why is it so 'evil'? Well, like you found the audio quality can degrade seriously
EDIT : If you decide to use MPC for the MD recording, it might be a good idea to clearly mark your files as transcoded, after transcoding...