I've decided to try out MPC after reading all the heaps of praise. I've been a big MP3 fan because of its ubiquity and ease and the fact that I rarely hear differences between a well-coded MP3 and the original WAV under ABX. However, its status as a poor archival format bugs me.

I have been using LAME 3.90.2 MMX "--alt-preset standard/extreme" and found the results to be excellent in almost all situations. It creates an occasional artifact in some music, but I don't know if I should tolerate it or not (compared to other lossy formats).

I've downloaded the 0.90s MPC encoder and the 0.98z2 decoder. I've been encoding with "mppenc --xtreme" using MPC Batch Encoder and listening to the resulting MPC files with a WinAMP plug-in that came with the decoder zip. Is that all there is to it?

I've tried to read about replaygain, but I'm confused. I ran "replaygain --auto *.mpc", but it gives me a "Can't decode [inputfile]" error. I never normalized my MP3 files so I don't know if I want to mess around with replaygain. I don't care much about comparative volume: if the album was recorded "loud", I want the resulting MPC file to be "loud"...and vice versa.

MPC sounds promising. I encoded all of Live's "Distance to Here" album and the MPC (xtreme) files require 78.7MB whereas the MP3 (standard) files require 89.7MB. Less space for supposed better quality? MP3 must have major problems in its design.

Would it be a good idea to embark on a major archival project with 0.90s or is it prudent to wait for some future release?

If you intend on encoding a large catalogue of music, it may be best to wait for SV8 with is supposedly just around the corner, if only for it's advanced tagging options. MPC is currently stuck with ID31.1 tags, truncated fields and all. Quality-wise, there's no way to really surpass what is already subjectively perfect...so you're OK on that front.

I just encoded a whole lot of material with .9o (coincidentally, The Distance To Here was one of ~10 CDs I encoded) and have been extremely satisfied with it. There is virtually nothing you can do with MPC to "break" the quality, unlike with LAME. Now if only there was some movement on the MPC to MP3 direct transcode front, it would be a lot easier to load my Rio.

replaygain.exe doesn't find your mppdec.exe. You could put mppdec.exe to your WIN -directory.

http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/bin/mppdec...dows-0.98z2.zip

Easy to use MPC the right way:

mppenc --xtreme --verbose %1.wav %1.mpc

OR IF YOU REALLY NEED IT

mppenc --insane --verbose %1.wav %1.mpc

Other than that as mpcfiend said wait for SV8 as that would be a more complete package for you to encode your collection and ID tag them.

Cheers and Musepack ROCKS!!!!
AgentMil