Ok, since my MP3 collection has been destroyed I've been looking into using a more advanced encoder.. From the looks of it MPC seems to be the (lossy) codec of choice for quality. But I keep seeing posts now and then mentioning SV8.. Anyway, some questions about MPC:

Any idea when SV8 will actually be released?

Is the only new feature additional tagging possibilities? Right now, it's just got ID3V1.1, since V2 doesn't work too well w/ MPC?

Also, what kind of average bit rates should I expect with extreme and insane?

Is there really no hope of seeing portable MPC players?

-Leto

With the new mpc plugin id3v2-tags shouldn't cause problems.
Or am I wrong?

From what I understood, it made it so they wouldn't cause problems, but they were just ignored -- not used.

They say it is "right around the corner". How that gets translated into days or weeks is anybody's guess.

I think SV 8 will have some kind of automatic replaygain functionality. It seems SV 8 will decrease the average bitrate for some kinds of encoded music but supposedly there won't be any large step up in quality since the encoder is basically fully realized already. MusePack needs help from a usability standpoint - not really a quality one - and most future releases will probably focus on this.

Extreme - 190-205kbps
Insane - 235-260kbps

It actually doesn't fluctuate too much, unlike LAME VBR.
Can't say yet but it likely won't be the first "next generation" format to get the portable player treatment. Ogg Vorbis seems to the benefactor in that regard. However, if you encode your WAVs with MusePack's --insane switch, you could transcode to whatever the future portable format of choice is and not lose much quality since --insane is already so transparent...and in the meantime have your music encoded in the best lossy format current available.

>Any idea when SV8 will actually be released?

>Is the only new feature additional tagging possibilities? Right
>now, it's just got ID3V1.1, since V2 doesn't work too well w/
>MPC?

Here is an abstract from buschel, the author of mpc, written on www.chaostar.org/phorum, last year.

Date: 04-08-01 03:37

hi,

i really cannot tell any estimated release date for SV8. and of course there will be encoder-updates, if there any bad errors, problems that i should fix with the current encoder...
the SV8-encoder will not only have a new bitstream, but will be completely restructured. i cannot explain all of the changes that are taken into consideration right now, but there will be much bigger changes than ever before... some of the basic new techniques are implemented, but everything is heavily under construction. the lossless data-packing and the quantization stuff has to be completely re-designed. implementing streaming-capabilites and/or better error-resilience is the smallest challenge within all of this changes...
so, i will need some time

andree

Yeah you need to have a plugin or something to show the tags.

>Yeah you need to have a plugin or something to show the tags.

Gee, i wonder what type of software would do that?