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Topic: The Definitive Question (Read 4335 times) previous topic - next topic
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The Definitive Question

Ciao, I'm Italian and my english is very bad jet !
I'm a beginner in the audio-compression-world and i have a big doubt: MP3 or MPC ?
Can U answer to the next question, please ?
" About absolute quality and about bitrate-quality ratio, is there anyone here who can say < MP3 is better than MPC > " ?
Mr Dibrom, is your LAME Insane Mode better than Extreme MPC ?
What quality level of MPC is ALWAYS trasparent to your golden hears ? Standard, Extreme or Insane ? ...Or maybe one of these settings whit any correction put in the command line ???


I have to encode all my CD collection and I want to choose the right settings for the right encoder...

Thank You !

The Definitive Question

Reply #1 –
Ciao, I'm Italian and my english is very bad jet !

---Me too, Italian-American though

I'm a beginner in the audio-compression-world and i have a big doubt: MP3 or MPC ?
Can U answer to the next question, please ?

" About absolute quality and about bitrate-quality ratio, is there anyone here who can say < MP3 is better than MPC > " ?

---MPC is better quality than MP3

Mr Dibrom, is your LAME Insane Mode better than Extreme MPC ?

---I'm not Dibrom, but he would probably say that MPC is still better overall, less problems with hard to encode files...

What quality level of MPC is ALWAYS trasparent to your golden hears ? Standard, Extreme or Insane ? .

---I don't have golden ears, but pretty good hearing.  Most people agree that standard is excellent quality, probably it will fit your needs just fine.  Extreme and insane are only for people with very good hearing or who want the best MPC could offer...

RD

The Definitive Question

Reply #2 –
Quote
Originally posted by pecosbill76
Ciao, I'm Italian and my english is very bad jet !
I'm a beginner in the audio-compression-world and i have a big doubt: MP3 or MPC ?
Can U answer to the next question, please ?
" About absolute quality and about bitrate-quality ratio, is there anyone here who can say < MP3 is better than MPC > " ?


Yes, for absolute quality, MPC is better than MP3.  There is no doubt about that.

Quote
Mr Dibrom, is your LAME Insane Mode better than Extreme MPC ?


No.

Quote
What quality level of MPC is ALWAYS trasparent to your golden hears ? Standard, Extreme or Insane ? ...Or maybe one of these settings whit any correction put in the command line ???


If you want to lean towards lower filesizes, -xtreme -nmt 10 is transparent to me probably 95% of the the time.  If you want to lean towards quality, -insane should take care of the rest for the most part.

Quote
I have to encode all my CD collection and I want to choose the right settings for the right encoder...


If it is quality alone that is your concern, then definitely the way to go is MPC.

The Definitive Question

Reply #3 –
MPC is the best quality mid/high bitrate format.
Despite what some Ogg Vorbis enthusiastics try to tell you, you can't be "locked" into MPC format, simply because MPC decoder is open source code.
I list some points about few audio formats in my opinion:

MPC:
+ the best quality at mid/high bitrates
+ very fast encoding end decoding
+ decoder is free open source
+ current encoder will remain free
+ will be playable in future programmable portable PDAs
+ downloadable files are high quality (no MP3-like quality differencies)
- no dedicated portable player or hardware support

MP3:
+ the best portability, software and hardware support
+ encoder and decoder source code available
+ quality is decent with high bitrate and with high bitrate vbr
+ future harware support is pretty much certain
- quality is not enough for demanding people
- many MP3s available for download are far from optimal quality, because bad quality encoders exists.
- many different quality encoders (some are very bad quality)

Ogg Vorbis:
+ free, encoder and decoder are open source
+ patent free technology, streaming is free of charge
+ noticeably better quality than MP3 at all bitrates
+ with recent tuned encoder versions (Garf's tuned) quality gap between Ogg Vorbis and MPC is closing
+ bitrate peeling
+ most likely format to achieve the largest user base after MP3
+ downloadable files are high quality (no MP3-like quality differencies)
- no dedicated portable player or hardware support yet
- still not final, development of encoder release candidates takes long time
Juha Laaksonheimo

The Definitive Question

Reply #4 –
Quote
Originally posted by JohnV


Ogg Vorbis:
+ noticeably better quality than MP3 at all bitrates
+ with recent tuned encoder versions (Garf's tuned) quality gap between Ogg Vorbis and MPC is closing

So if I prefer quality and don't like mpc, should I use Ogg instead of lame --alt-preset high, normal?

http://sjeng.sourceforge.net/ftp/vorbis/
Which file with which  switches?

The Definitive Question

Reply #5 –
If you don't like mpc, you don't really prefer quality..

Also the comments about Vorbis' quality had a quite large future estimation value... At lower under 160kbps, Vorbis is anyway already clearly better than MP3.

I haven't really directly compared Dibrom's normal vs Vorbis RC2-GT2 . One reason is that in Garf's tuned version only 128,160 and 350kbps profiles are tuned. So very fair comparison isn't yet possible. RC3 will hopefully make comparisons easier...
Juha Laaksonheimo