Musepack - better than vorbis or aac?

[aleksander]

Hi there!
Recently on one of my country's board I have read about something what is called Musepack (formerly known as .mp+). It is supposed to be better than mp3, vorbis or even aac.
Has any one of you guys, audio gurus, used it?
I don't have good equipment to judge it by myself, so I will rely on your opinions.
How about using it for our movies? Probably there is no tool that can multiplex it, but hey, we have very skilled and talented programmers here ;)
Ok. For some of you, here are the links:
http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/
http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/ (here you can find some tools for Musepack and AAC)

People say that its --standard settings are far better than the mp3 ones. And it's supposed to be faster.
I recommend you try these settings:
--insane
--braindead
--braindead --minSMR 3

Ok. Waiting for your opinions.

take care

[Nic]

MPC/Musepack/MP+ is an everso high quality codec developed by Andree Buschmann....

I once was going to write a plugin for Sonique for it...& have been meaning to for ages. For high bitrates, it still rules the roost. The bitrates normally asociated with MPC are probably too high for our video encoding needs. (although in my experience, its very good at medium bitrates as well)

You can read loads & loads about it at www.hydrogenaudio.org :)

-Nic

[aleksander]

Thanks Nic.
I don't visit hydrogenaudio at all that's why when I read about it, it was something new for me. I guess it's time for me to start visiting this forum :D

take care

[canadian_fbi]

ever since i read about mpc a few months ago i've been encoding all my music in it. i'm very impressed by what it can get done at 170 kbps.

as far as for use in divx... i agree it's too high bitrate for most people and most movies. however, there have been a few encodes that i've done where i wished i could use it. movies that were two cds but didn't really have the space for the ac3, or 1 cd rips with very compressible video and lots of room for audio. i would've liked a good mpc -standard audio track in there, at about 170 kbps and basically indistinguishable from the original. actually, it might end up being even under 170, as most movies are more compressible audio-wise than music, i think. but unfortunately the filters and whatnot don't exist for playback in a divx movie that i'm aware of...

[DSPguru]

btw, there's also mp3pro. it's based on sbr :
http://www.codingtechnologies.com/technology/sbr.htm

@fbi
have you ever tried encoding to AAC ?

[canadian_fbi]

Originally posted by DSPguru
@fbi
have you ever tried encoding to AAC ?
a couple of times... once something like three and a half years ago and once recently to compare it to ogg vorbis. three and a half years ago i didn't see any real difference between it and vqf, and vqf had better encoding/decoding so i used that. this year i wasn't that impressed with aac at lower bitrates, at least not to the point where i would strongly advocate it over vorbis, since that appears to be taking off and is fully supported now. but i suppose i've never really tried it at high bitrates... though i remember reading something on hydrogenaudio that said that mpc encoded in such a manner that made it inherently superior at higher bitrates than mp3 or vorbis.

[Nic]

AAC & SBR for our own pleasure (i.e. Psytel & FAAC) isnt _that_ far away :) :)

-Nic

[Prosper]

Personally, I really like mpc, at least for music. And encoding is _super_ fast, many many times faster than aac, ogg, or LAME.

[soujir0u]

Yea, MPC rules when it comes to encoding audio CDs. But I think it only supports 44.1KHz, so even if we could mux it with video files, we would need to downsample the audio. As for Mp3Pro, that's only good for really low bitrates, about 64kbps. But I never go below 128kbps, anything below that sounds pretty crap to me!