I'm new to this forum but I've been reading bits and pieces about musepack, aac and ogg vorbis for a little while and all the information available is a bit.. well, muddy. I've probably not found the right place to look yet and that's my fault, but I thought some clarification on the pros and cons of the three aforementioned codecs and any other high quality lossy codecs would be welcomed by all.

I've been using vorbis for a few years and its gradually got better and better. I encode at 128kbps because, with my speaker setup, i can't tell the difference between the vorbis file and the cd. Others may well be able to, that's why I'm posting this thread. I've also found that the ogg tags work very well and the support, while still not massive, is growing and has come a long way. Basically I think vorbis is pretty darn good. There are plenty of implementations of it, it's easy to use (even the cli encoder). Tagging works flawlessly. It seems to be all there.

I've been playing with aac and musepack for a few weeks and have found little to no reason to swap. This may be because of my speaker setup, or the awkwardness (so I've found) of the encoders themselves. Anyway, here goes. Bear in mind this is at my personal target bitrate of 128kbps. I may be swayed up to 160kbps if someone comes up with a good enough argument.

Ogg Vorbis
Pros:

-Quite widely supported in cd rippers nowadays. (CDex is very good, fast, has normalisation and everything. LameFE is faster, but no normalisation and it's a bit young if you ask me, needs to mature. EAC is excellent for quality, bit slow when you use the non-burst modes but that's the price you have to pay... )
-Tagging works flawlessly
-No discernible (to me through my speakers, if i had a better set up i may notice something) difference between vorbis and the cd at 128kbps (quality .4)
-Encodes quite quickly now (used to be quite slow)

Cons:
-Not supported throughout, but it's supported by winamp (2.9 is good, 3 is bad), foobar2000 (yey! ), CDex, easy enough to setup in EAC and a whole load of other software.

I can't think of much else, feel free to add to this.

Musepack (used to be mp3pro or mpegplus or something)
Pros:

-Supposed very high quality at 128kbps+ but I can't really comment.
-Reasonably quick encoding

Cons:

-I've found the tagging using the cli in CDex and EAC to be awkward and doesn't always fill out the entire name, i.e. if I try to set the title to "Dream Theater" it will only set it as "Dream" I think this may be a problem with me not using quotes or something. The spaces might screw it up.

Could someone tell me their "optimal quality settings" and explain how to get the tagging working properly please? Then i might switch.

AAC
Pros:

-Again supposedly high quality, especially at lower bitrates (which made me think it may be the codec of choice for me)

Cons:

-Very awkward to use
-I've tried and tried and I cannot get tagging to work at all
-Not very accessible, if you want to try some of the command line encoders, search for "rarewares" on google. (not, that is NOT a warez site) They have the psytel aac encoders and faac as well.
-Slow encoding using certain quality settings. (mpeg 4 LTP is the slow option, or so i've discovered)

Again if someone can tell me how to sort out the tagging and tell me their optimal quality settings (command line or whatever) I would be most grateful.

Sorry for the long post. Thank you very much for your time. I hope this thread is of use to many people. Please add more information about any other codecs and the ones mentioned above so that everyone can benefit from your knowledge and experiences.

Bye for now B)

First, nice to see another person that likes to test new codecs.

But...

1. This is the fb2k forum, not the HA "General" Forum, this is way off-topic. If it would had anything to do with fb2k supporting or not those codecs, thats a different story.

2. More to the point, just use whatever you want/like. Most people (like myself) and i guess you, will just use whatever "sounds" better. However, most people here dont really care unless you ABX tests on them, so again, this is another: "Supposed very high quality" codec discussion which leads to nowhere. Personally? Whatever codec spreads better on eMule/Kazaa wins ;-)

3. And besides, most answeres you seek already been answered by several threads on this board, just use search. However, nothing beats personal testing, as there are some people who will find 128k just fine, and others go "insane" with mpc, so the final vote will be the one you'll cast anyway.

sorry. I thought people could post about anything. OK, well in that case...

foobar2000 is really good, much better than winamp in terms of memory, cpu usage and useability.

I've thought of a couple of things I miss, having switched from winamp (as I'm sure most have). Plugins maybe?

1) Some sort of song title "ticker" that could be docked to the top of the screen. I've tried the window titlebar thing, but it isn't so good if there are long titles in the titlebar anyway. It's not quite what I'd like anyway. And the systray popup thing is a bit imposing. Just a thought.

2) erm, i can't think of anything else

Keep up the good work Peter! (and others)

You can make the artist - title (or whatever you want) info to scroll on the window titlebar, and then only show the titlebar, so also long filenames will be shown well

Here's the code, just change the %artist% - %title% to what you want to display and then change the length also:

cool, sounds good anza, thanks. code look good, but me stupid, what do i do with code?

Preferences > Display > Title Formatting > Window Title

This guy is double posting cuz he got a less than than cheerful answer on the main forum

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....t=ST&f=1&t=8149

Not quite. I copied it across to the general HA forum because I got a nice answer here but was told it would be more relevant there. Turns out I got a nicer answer here than I did on there. But I'll know not to post irrelevant threads now.

Thanks voltron, and again anza.

I'm sorry if I've annoyed people by posting what I thought would be a useful thread.

No problem, but it's not fully my code, so don't thank me too much

well my thanks go to whoever has contributed to the code, and i should've guessed that you put it in the window title bit really, just me being stupid. thanks to all who do anything good for anyone or any purpose. (note only thanks for good things, not bad things)