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 one of 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, 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

One of the best lossy encoder for mid-high bitrates
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