I just made Red Hot chili Peppers CD to MPC with 1.14 --standard --xlevel and in some tracks I have strangly low bitrate - 117.9 for eg... is this correct ? because I heard that below 160 MPC is not good...

Thx

It can happen that you get bitrates that low.
Normally it only happens with very mono-like material. Only thing you can conclude is that mpc found it easy to encode and you can be happy about the low bitrate.

About MPC not being good below 160 is just to tell ppl that if they aim for bitrates lower than 160kbps (maybe this is set too high) they shouldn't use mpc because it normally needs more to be of the great quality it is.

But this is STEREO 44.1kHz 16b and almost 3 minutes lenght sample - Get On Top from Californication album so I don't know what to do.... try with --extreme ?

I have the same problem with Red Hot Chili Peppers

No, try to ABX them first
This tracks contain a lot of mono-like passage, artificially poor sound. This is why --standard gives you a low bitrate.
I have a lot of digital recording of piano music ; bitrate is very low too compared to other. I tried to ABX them, but I can't.

If you want, try --standard --ms 15

Heh so this is tipical for Red Hot... but this results are really strange - in some tracks bitrarte gets down to 90-100 for a while!

--standard --ms 15 IS the solution. But I doubt that you're able to hear any difference.

Thanks

I'll try ABX first...

Ok I tried with ABX and I don't hear diference between MPC --standard and orgilnal so I decided to stay with this but I'm not sure - so low bitrate

Yeah well, you should be happy you're getting great quality at such low bitrate. :-) Don't worry, if mpc goes that low that means it simply doesn't need to use more bits, simple.

OK so now I'm sure that MPC is really good - why? - becuase of "very inteligent" sample analyze and best VBR mode ever!

Q! - I'm glad to have MPC on my PC

(funny post - I'm happy)

Sorry for bumping such an old post, but I just thought of something. I just encoded this album myself and got the same results. I think I know why. This is the LOUDEST damn album I have ever heard. Replay gain had to turn it down by 13db! That means the thing must have been compressed like hell. I think that has something to do with it. A song where the average volume is the peak volume has got to be easy on the bits.

i don't think it has to do with loudness. I should be because of the lack of difference between channels.

I had a 130.9Kbps MPC in one Elton John song in the 'Rare Masters' Album, I also thought there was something wrong so I re-ripped and encoded with lame:



It was mono!

I don't doubt that a mono recording will use a low bitrate, but I think loudness would be a factor as well. MPC uses some form of Huffman encoding. If that's what I was told it was in my discrete math and algorithms courses, then the tree created for the height of the samples is going to be very heavily weighted on the one bit that is the average volume (and those directly around it) since very many samples will reach that volume or very close to it. That means that before you take the psychoacoustics into account there has allready been a substantal lossless compression. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone. Maybe I'll edit this in the morning, I'm too tired right now to make sense.

It's all about the high loudness that have the albums of Red Hot Chili Peppers, I was obtain low bitrates with some dance music that are overcompressed too. I think that the almost the hard compressed (dinamically) take a low bitrates when is compressed in lossy formats. Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers sounds horribly overcompressed for me. but I like Red Hot Chili Peppers