My Departure from Mp3s

[Bombardier]

My Mp3 Departure

First things first. I have officially stopped encoding music into mp3 format. I have chosen the MusePack format instead for my future album rips. MusePack produces .mpc, .mpp, or .mp+ files. Sure, I'll still download mp3s since that's pretty much all there is on a lot of P2P networks and web sites.

Why the switch from the long time de-facto standard? Well, I was reading a few pages on the HydrogenAudio forums and I got linked to a few good pages that described the various audio formats and their positives/negative aspects.

One of the links was http://www.audiocoding.com/wiki/index.php?page=MPC

To me, MusePack encoded files just sound better than mp3s. I visited

http://www.modatic.net/audio/mpc.php

and it explained a lot about the format and provided a frontend audio encoding/decoding application. I rip my audio files to the "braindead" preset.

"--braindead" - is a preset that has even more leeway. Results in extremely high quality. It usually averages in bitrates ~270Kbit/s* (still unmatched quality!)

Winamp 2.x doesn't natively play .mpc files, so I downloaded and use Foobar2000 as my audio player. If there was one real disadvantage of .mpc right now is that a lot of portable audio players (ie. iPod...etc) don't support that audio format. I'm sure with time that companies will include .mpc support in their portable audio devices.

:groovin:

[Umma]

Foobar's a good player. It might not have the flashing lights that winamp has but it sounds better to my ear.

[jipper]

er..umma..isnt that a post for the winamp post..?

[jipper]

er..mr.jip....you should try reading the full thread before you post

[Umma]

:rotfl:

[jipper]

foobar is wack tho....

[rainbowdemon]

Why?

[jipper]

because method said so

[Umma]

method is GREEK.... he's one letter over GEEK..... ignore him

[jipper]

GREEK = uber l337 audiophile head

[rainbowdemon]

method is GREEK.... he's one letter over GEEK..... ignore him

[method77]

I'm not sure if the companies make players for those types. Same goes for ogg. The big corporations chose mp3s and we're all stuck with it. Not necessarilly a bad thing though

...and Umma.. never underestimate a gee...err.. a greek

[Ken]

Well, I like OGG or variable bit rate MP3s (alt-preset-standard).

Though, when browsing the newsgroups (which is where I like to look for music these days), I like lossless APE format (monkey's audio). Bigger files, yeah, but with newsgroups, you get excellent speeds, and I have the hard drive space for it.

Monkey's Audio has a plug-in for Winamp too!

My encoding habits usually have me use OGG and MP3s (variable bit rate, using CDex; max 320 kbps, min 32 kbps, alt-preset-standard)

[jipper]

isnt m0nk3y's files big compared with mp3's and 0gg's?

[Ken]

isnt m0nk3y's files big compared with mp3's and 0gg's?

Yeah, average size is around 20 - 25MB

[jipper]

[jipper]

its elitist to modem users....