Hi, I'm fairly new to the compressed-audio scene, but I've been really interested in seeing how well I can ABX certain samples.

I did two tests on castanets.wav using MPCenc v0.90n, preset Extreme, and MPCdec v0.98, and got a 14/17 on the first test and a 9/10 on the second. I was only listening to the first four castanet clicks during the test, then rewinding and re-listening.

I know MPC-extreme is supposed to be almost perfectly transparent, and my ears aren't that good, so I assume I'm doing something wrong with the encoding or decoding.

I think I used clipping prevention on the first clip, so I re-encoded and re-decoded the files, using the commandlines:

mppenc c.wav c_ext.mpc -xtreme
and
mppdec c_ext.mpc c_ext.wav

and scored a 16/22 (2% probability of guessing).


My questions are:

1) Am I doing something wrong with the encoding/decoding?

2) Is castanets.wav known to be widely non-transparent, even using MPC-extreme?

3) Is there anything I can do to increase the temporal resolution (or whatever it is) to reduce the problems with castanets.wav?

-SometimesWarrior