I'm thinking about putting my CDs in MPC format on my comp. Will standard transcode to other formats pretty well (i.e. ogg -q 2)? I realise that quality will be lost with the two conversions, but if I have to use mpc insane then I may as well leave my collection in mp3 and not do any transcoding. Any ideas are apreceated, thanks.

only --insane for transcoding!
but --insane MPC will have less pre-echo than MP3, then if you transcode them to OGG the pre-echo will be less too

No. (with all respect, but that statement is insane)

All depends on the final codecs & bitrates you have in mind. The higher quality that one, the higher you have to start.
The rest is a matter of trying out, testing.

MPC Insane - or better: --quality 7 - is indeed often mentioned and often used for transcoding, because it has proven its worth when transcoding to high quality MP3 (APS, APX).
For Vorbis @ -q2 for instance - like torok suggested - quality 7 is 'overkill'. In other circumstances --quality 7 might be not enough (I use --quality 9 or sometimes even lossless for real archiving = if I want to keep all future possibilities open).

Again, you have to be more precise. What are your plans with the files? What kind of format + bitrate are you going to transcode to?

You should try out AudioWizz if you plan to transcode. It will make your life very easy! Just make sure you backup the originals!

Well, anything I transcode them to will be as small as I can get while still having transperency to me. That means about OGG quality 2 or MP3 about 160. I'm going to see what AAC has to offer, and I may go with that. I'd assume I could go under 128 with that one. Hopefully hit the bitrates that OGG can get to.

Basicaly, I want an archive version on my computer that I can transcode to my portable when I want to. I would go lossless, but hard drive space is a consideration. Not a huge one, but I do need to get more then 65% compression.

This is all in preperation for some new SlimX firmwares.

Doesn't run on XP. What is it?

I encode MPC --standard (quality 5), then transcode to --alt-preset fast standard -Y. The quality is good; I did some tests with a batch of Lame test samples. I compared Original -> Lame --aps and MPC -> Lame --aps, and all samples were either transparent in both cases, or not transparent in either case. In other words, the resulting MP3 files were of comparable quality. Of course there are probably situations where the MPC -> MP3 file is degraded because the MP3's source is not the Original, but these situations are rare enough that I don't care.

Of course, you can transcode to any MP3 or Vorbis bitrate you want, not just --aps. And if you're transcoding to Vorbis -q2, I'd wager that MPC --radio (quality 4) would be a sufficient source for transcoding. By that statement, I'm just saying that MPC --standard should give you plenty of transcoding headroom.

The claim that you need MPC --insane as the transcoding source is indeed insane.

That AudioWizz program has an amazingly sparse webpage.

I use MPxchange for MPC -> MP3 transcoding (the link goes to RareWares). I think Oggifier will work well for MPC -> Vorbis.

It is a program which allows you to encode, decode, and most important of all transcode any audio format to any audio format!!!

Supports the following formats aac, ape, flac, la, mp3, mpc, ofr, ogg, pac, rka, shn, spx, and wv

I disabled it from running on winxp as I have not tested it on that platform, and did not want to cause any harm to your computer

It will only work on win2k for now!

just did a similar test with just one randomly picked file, i tryed to abx
'mpc -q7' vs 'mpc -q5 transcoded to aps mp3 and again transcoded to mpc -q5'
cant abx.

(using mpc encoder 1.14 beta and lame 3.90.2)

Was that reply for me?

actualy a sort of reply to warriors post (but two posts happened before i managed to press that addreply button)

Simplicity is the key!

I agree!

A wee bit of documentation never hurts... I mean, even the Foobar webpage had a couple sentences of info when it first went online