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Topic: Portable Musepack player? (Read 43434 times) previous topic - next topic
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Portable Musepack player?

Reply #50 –
Since nobody has brought it forward yet... How about MPC support on Pocket PC systems? How difficult would it be to port the decoder to the PPC system? In any case, I'd say the Pocket PC possibility more viable than a hardware one, although I must confess my ignorance about what kind of obstacles have to be tackled in order to port it successfully...

EDIT: Whoohoo, my 200th post.

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #51 –
Man, and I would think this would be the last place people would troll Musepack. Go do it on other audio-type forums, and I guarantee you'll be running back here with your tail between your legs.
Contrary to my condescending tone, practically ALL my audio files on the computer are in the Musepack format (-standard), and I transcode to mp3 for my portable if necessary.

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #52 –
OK, this is my take on MPC hardware support in general:

I don't see an issue with MPC support in home theater system. The future is digital media center. With big players like Microsoft, Sony, Dell, Gateway, HP and all other big brothers trying to shove "digital entertainment PC" down our throat, it is going to be sooner than we might think of seeing PC based entertainment system in our living room. Look at some of these products that all hardware makers trying to introduce:

http://www.gateway.com/dw/home/fmc901_proddesc.shtml
http://www.viewsonic.com/products/mediacntr_m2100.htm
http://usa.asus.com/products/desktop/digim...ix/overview.htm
http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/produc...ies=1&model=146
http://www.msi.com.tw/html/products/mega_s..._megaseries.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediace...buy/default.asp

With media center it doesn't really matter which format is supported. You can have all formats supported, leaving the option on you to decide. Not some big corporate to decide which format you should stick to. Not to mention that some specialized players like xBox, PlayStations are going to have some modded media player that will support most media format including MPC sooner or later.

IMO, We are going to see Home Entertainment PC in our living room sooner than any (consumer electronics based) home theater system supporting MP4, AAC, MPC or Vorbis.  Which will make "MPC (or put any of your disliked format here) won't see hardware support" a moot point.

MP4 or AAC will be interesting for digital streaming media and multi-channel support. Which will require to sqeeze more in lower bitrate. That's why smart companies like Ahead are giving priority on tuning lower bitrate than higher one. Because with the falling storage cost and bigger media availability lossy audio compression will be less attractive by the time some fine tuned newer codecs (MP4 /AAC) will be ready for mass consumption in home theater and the time will take to educate them on newer format.

As for the portable audio player, I am quite sure that the future is all-in-one device with cell phone, PDA, digital media player, digital camera and what-not combo device running some sort of general purpose OS on them. Which will make it easy to support any media format including MPC. There are growing number of people already using PDA with Palm OS or Windows CE as portable audio player, which can easily support any media format. Although, I see there will be some intermediate device like iPod, Zen or flash based, PDA, cell phone or, portable media player dominating in the market before technology is matured enough to combine all of them together.

However, these are all my opinion. Only time will tell.
-- Floydian Slip

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #53 –
Quote
-Lack of support (no playback in Mac....

things change:
mppenc 1.15r now compiling on OSX

lol.. not trying to nitpick.. but I guess I just did.. lol

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #54 –
Quote
Quote
-Lack of support (no playback in Mac....

things change:
mppenc 1.15r now compiling on OSX

lol.. not trying to nitpick.. but I guess I just did.. lol

Well, I meant there is no player for it on the Mac. Maybe you can playback with mppdec for OSX, but I don't think that is really pratical.

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #55 –
Quote
@Pike
I want what you're smoking...

Quote
I, too, would like what Pike84 is smoking.


Ok, I take these as compliments, although I'm not smoking anything .
________

I'm with Floydian Slip here. He has some good points, and especially this:
Quote
Only time will tell.

Indeed. Let's just hope for the best and fear for the worst . Though, even the worst isn't so bad .

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #56 –
I know I'm a little late on this one, so excuse me. But hey, Pike84's optimism is no bad thing. I would love to see more support for MusePack, it's a fantastic format as many of us already know, and I have successfully converted quite a few people to MPC from mp3 recently. The people I converted love it and tell me they're gonna encode everything in MPC in future. So what I'm saying is, if more people use MPC, and we can show others why there's some great reasons to switch, then there might be more support for it. If everyone used it then there would have to be support for it. I don't like this "there will NEVER be any support for MPC, ever" rubbish and I like to think more positive. I'm still being realistic, but come on now, more positive thinking please!

Merry christmas.

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #57 –
musepack on PocketPC might become reality soon. Marc promised to look at it right after he has implemented matroska support into PocketMVP  ....

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #58 –
Quote
musepack on PocketPC might become reality soon. Marc promised to look at it right after he has implemented matroska support into PocketMVP  ....
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=166066"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Any news on that?

Bart
signature removed by moderation - read TOS #11

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #59 –
You are all forgetting one HUGE market.  The Sony PSP.

With the new leak of the official dev kit and the 1.5 firmware hack, homebrew apps come out faster than you can count them.

Within a year we will have a good hardware MPC player for around $150.  Slot in a nice 2gig flash card and you're good to go.

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #60 –
My H120 has kinda bad Musepack support with Rockbox right now but they're working on it.  Still I don't see myself using it like I thought I would in the past.  We'll see but unlike in the past the other formats have really caught up to it in a lot of ways and transparency is possible for a lot of formats now at very acceptable bitrates
Nero AAC 1.5.1.0: -q0.45

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #61 –
Why re-activating such an old thread ? Musepack support on PocketPC's exists since a long time now. Use search.

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #62 –
Quote
Why re-activating such an old thread ? Musepack support on PocketPC's exists since a long time now. Use search.


oh so helpful

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #63 –
Sorry to be a little off topic but... it's still about prtable players.
Almost all my music collection is made up from mpcs (most of them from friends). What I like about mpc is that it stores inside the header (I think there's the place where the technical info it's stored) the profile at whitch it was encoded. Together with the EAC log it gives you an idea about it's quality.
In fact this is one of the reasons why I've tryed to have all my music in mpc files. Yes, Vorbis offers transparancy too, but I can't listen to every album that I get and decide if it could sound better (I don't always have the original for comparison).
But Musepack has it's lack of hardware support. :-( So every time when I want to take my CD-mp3 player with me I have to transcode those mpcs (that's why for me transparency it's at q7-q8).
But I wanna buy a new portable player. And I'll have to change the format (I don't wanna transcode all my life and I don't have the space to store both mpcs and mp3s).
So what should I choose?
I have a few Vorbises and I've seen (in foobar2000) that they have a "bitrate_nominal". But this doesn't reflects the encoding profile, right? (for example q5 will always have to have a nominal bitrate of 160)
So, to be clear I need a modern format that stores it's coding profile in the coded files, a format that has a good hardware support. (popularity and file-sharing support would be even better ).
Thank you!


PS: If this tread it's not OK with this forums rules (sorry but I didn't read thel all) please cut the "illegal" parts!

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #64 –
Quote
But I wanna buy a new portable player. And I'll have to change the format (I don't wanna transcode all my life and I don't have the space to store both mpcs and mp3s).
So what should I choose?
  ... simple. A Palm or a PocketPC, with TCPMP installed, and a nice 2 GB SD card in it for your MPC files ....

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #65 –
Quote
.
But I wanna buy a new portable player. And I'll have to change the format (I don't wanna transcode all my life and I don't have the space to store both mpcs and mp3s).
So what should I choose?
I have a few Vorbises and I've seen (in foobar2000) that they have a "bitrate_nominal". But this doesn't reflects the encoding profile, right? (for example q5 will always have to have a nominal bitrate of 160)
So, to be clear I need a modern format that stores it's coding profile in the coded files, a format that has a good hardware support. (popularity and file-sharing support would be even better ).
Thank you!


You can use Lame MP3:

--preset medum / standard / extreme / insane (160 / 190 / 250 / 320kbit)

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #66 –
shadowking you advise me to use Lame to transcode all those mpc. Sorry but that's one option I don't agree with. Nor to have both an mpc and an mp3 version of the same album, nor to delete mpcs after transcoding. For me mp3 it's too old for my needs!
Thanks ChristianHJW for your answer, but there is a "but": I don't wanna spend money on some super fancy "do everything" Palm or PPC. I only want a portable player, with good sound and life span (at least 10 hours). So if you can name one Palm or PPC that can fit my needs... I'm all eyes! :-)
Thank you!

Edit: Warez request removed by moderation.

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #67 –
Well, all the significant formats are discussed here with common regularity.  The only other format that has even miniscule hardware support is AAC thanks to the popularity of Ipod and Itunes, and I don't think it stores the encoding profile like you would prefer.  Ogg has overall better firmware support following mp3 but doesn't meet your demands either as you noted above.  If you can find yerself one of the old Iriver hard drive players (and utilize the 3rd party Rockbox firmware) then you don't have to discard mpc (this situation would also apply to the Palm Pilot and the PSP, which are excessively feature-packed for your requirements).

You will clearly have to make some sacrifices in the near future.

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #68 –
Seems that Archos and iRiver will have support for Musepack in the next months. (http://www.rockbox.org/) If this happens then iriver H120 would be a greadt player for me. :-)
Till then...

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #69 –
Quote
Thanks ChristianHJW for your answer, but there is a "but": I don't wanna spend money on some super fancy "do everything" Palm or PPC. I only want a portable player, with good sound and life span (at least 10 hours). So if you can name one Palm or PPC that can fit my needs... I'm all eyes! :-)
Thank you!


The cost to reencode ( and burn ? ) your complete MPC collection in another format will be higher normally, unless your working time has no value. And with a Palm or PPC you'll be safe for the future ....

Christian

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #70 –
Quote
shadowking you advise me to use Lame to transcode all those mpc. Sorry but that's one option I don't agree with. Nor to have both an mpc and an mp3 version of the same album, nor to delete mpcs after transcoding. For me mp3 it's too old for my needs!
Edit: Warez request removed by moderation.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=315529"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]



No I did not advise to transcode. Let me clear the dillema: How many problems are there with  Lame -apx files ? Vorbis Q8 ? mpc q8 ?

All of these should be pretty much transparent at 250k and each will have an odd problem that the other doesn't. Also all transform and even sub-band codecs suffer from the same artifacts i.e. ringing, smearing, chirping.. so they are more similar than different.

My advise is to do future rips in mp3 or lossless. if you still want only mpc you will just have to settle for Palm or wait for more support.

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #71 –
Quote
Seems that Archos and iRiver will have support for Musepack in the next months. (http://www.rockbox.org/) If this happens then iriver H120 would be a greadt player for me. :-)
Till then...[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=315643"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Only the iRiver. The Archos uses a dedicated Micronas DSP for hardware decoding, therefore other formats can't be trivially added to it. In the iRiver, all decoding is done in software using a FreeScale microcontroller.

Quote
The cost to reencode ( and burn ? ) your complete MPC collection in another format will be higher normally, unless your working time has no value.[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=315645"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


"Working time" is nearly zero if he puts his entire MPC collection in foobar and let it transcode to other format overnight. Even re-ripping and encoding wouldn't take long. Burning costs are quite small too, as recordable media costs cents per unit.

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #72 –
Hey my old audio professionals,

I'm curious if someone has tested the "Rockbox" firmware and can tell me if it really supports MPC (have problems with the site) and is safe to use? I would definately buy an Archos MP3-Player then!

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #73 –
Quote
Hey my old audio professionals,

I'm curious if someone has tested the "Rockbox" firmware and can tell me if it really supports MPC (have problems with the site) and is safe to use? I would definately buy an Archos MP3-Player then!
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=335743"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Yes, it really supports MPC (realtime playback works), BUT the decoder is not optimized very much and it is said, that further optimisations are not trivial. Also seeking works in theory, but is unusably slow.

MPC is iRiver only. Archos only supports MP3 (hardware decoder).

Portable Musepack player?

Reply #74 –
Quote
Hey my old audio professionals,

I'm curious if someone has tested the "Rockbox" firmware and can tell me if it really supports MPC (have problems with the site) and is safe to use? I would definately buy an Archos MP3-Player then!
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=335743"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]



Yes mpc now plays back ok on a H140, however it currently has limitations:

Its not fully optimised so may skip on high bitrate settings.
It currently seems to excesivly spin the hdd which will lead to shorter battery life.
The WPS doesnt report the bitrate.
I've not tested weather its gapless, but due to being less optimised its possible gaps will happen.
I would say fastforward/rewind is unusable in its current state.