After hanging out in chat for the last couple of nights, I decided to go ahead and make the plunge and create some MPCs. The last two albums I had EAC'd, I had left the waves on my machine as I was going to play with various LAME settings (this was before I found HA and Dibrom's presets). So I just converted Buckethead-Colma-01-Whitewash.wav into an MPC (using mppenc1.15r @ --quality 7) and into an mp3 (using LAME 3.90.2 alt preset extreme). Playback was accomplished through winamp.278 and a plugin for mpc (in_mpc_0.98).

At first, I wasn't sure, but i think the mpc wins. And it's file size is a bit smaller. Need to do a few more listening tests and then do an actual ABX, but I think I like it.

try q5 and work your way up. If it sounds good to you why waste bits. Especially using mppenc1.15r, you shouldn't hear any artifacts as heard with 1.14. Which are very rare anyway.. Keep in mind mppenc1.15r is alpha and you should use the comment setting I have below to save the quality setting used ect, the alpha version does not store this information by default.

i'll abx some lower quality ones too. Yeah saving bits is a good thing to do. Waste not want not.

You might want to keep it at q6 if you plan on transcoding to MP3 later (for that iPod).