Revision as of 18:59, 2 July 2005

Introduction

Musepack is a lossy audio compression scheme created by Andree Buschmann. It is strongly based on the MPEG-1 Layer-2 (MP2) algorithms. Informal listening tests have demonstrated that MPC is the best lossy audio encoder at ~140kbps and above bitrates, but competes less well at lower, 'streaming' bitrates such as 32/48/64kbps. This is due to MPC being a subband codec as well as the fact that very little optimization has gone into such low bitrates. As can be seen in various 128kbit/s listening tests (see below), despite the fact that MPC has been optimized little for such bitrates it is in the same class of other modern competitors such as AAC and Ogg Vorbis.

Pros

Best lossy encoder for mid-high bitrates
Suffers from far less "problem cases" than other formats.
Very fast encoding/decoding
Designed to be transparent by default at --standard setting.
Open source encoder

Cons

Marginal support (yet) on portable players
No multichannel
No specification available
Seeking is imperfect (to be fixed in SV7.5)
Not streamable
Can't be cut/edited
No support for sampling rates above 48khz

@@ Line 18: / Line 18: @@
 * Can't be cut/edited
 * No support for [[sampling rate]]s above 48khz
-=Technical details=
-==Supported input formats (SV7)==
-* channels: 1 or 2
-* bit depths: 1 to 32 bit linear [[PCM]]
-* sample rates: 32kHz, 37.8kHz, 44.1kHz, 48kHz (44.1 and 48 are highly tuned)
-* [[WAV]], raw [[PCM]], a lot of [[lossless]] compressed audio formats like [[FLAC]], [[LPAC]], [[Monkey's_Audio|APE]], [[OptimFROG]], [[SZIP]] and Shorten ([[SHN]])
-==Encoder Functions==
-[[MPC Encoder Functions]]
-=Links=
-==User oriented links==
-* [http://musepack.net Musepack.net] - a general info, news and software site.
-* [[Case]]'s [http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/ page] (Winamp plug-ins and more).
-* [[Frank Klemm]]'s [http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/ official page (out of order now)]
-* Mirrored at: http://hydrogenaudio.org/musepack/klemm/www.personal.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/
-* [http://betaplayer.corecodec.org/ BetaPlayer], the first Musepack-able player on PocketPCs
-==Technical links==
-* [[Frank Klemm]]'s [http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/ official page]
-* [http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/wiki/?page=MPC MPC at AudioCodingWiki]
-* [http://www.caddr.com/code/libmusepack libmusepack portable musepack decoding library (in progress)]
-==Listening test involving MPC==
-* [http://ff123.net/128tests.html ff123's 128kbit/s group listening test]
-* [http://ff123.net/128test/instruct.html ff123's second 128kbit/s group listening test]
-* [http://audio.ciara.us/test/128extension/results.html rjamorim's 128kbit/s test]
-Please note that some of these tests, while valid, used versions of the encoders in almost all of the formats tested which have now been superseded. You should make your own decision about the comparative quality of MPC, listening to clips of music in the style you prefer.
-Also note that these are tests at low bitrates; an area where MPC is not particularly optimized. The encoder was designed by the author to be transparent at the --standard setting, thus little to no low [[bitrate]] tuning has gone into the [[codec]], opposite to that of [[AAC]], [[Ogg Vorbis]], [[WMA]] and others which focus more on this region. However, as can be seen in the various listening test pages, MPC competes surprisingly well with the rest of them.