General Questions regarding MPC

[samtaylor]

First of all, I just want to say that I have spent the better part of this afternoon and evening researching my predicament here. I'm an audiophile, but by saying that I just mean that I can't stand mp3's at 128kbits/sec. I'm not real technical about these things.

I'm running Xubuntu 8.10, which may be part of my problem 'cause I'm primarily a Windows user. My main PC is at college and I'm at home on this Linux laptop.

To try out MPC, I ripped two CDs (The Legendary Bobby Darin and Moby's Everything Is Wrong) with abcde via this guide. In regards to mppenc, I just used the "--standard" option.

Everything ripped and encoded fine - I was impressed by the short encoding time on this aging Thinkpad - but when I played the files, from both CDs, in both Exaile and Banshee there were noticeable clipping issues - especially with the vocals in the Bobby Darin album.

How can I solve this? I understand that SV8 should not have "internal clipping" issues, but I am trepidacious towards using the SV8 encoder. Will players like Banshee or Exaile be able to play the files produced by SV8?

Thank you very much.

[Seed]

Hi

For us to be able to study this case we need a very short lossless (FLAC/WavPack) version of the part of the track that's affected as well as the .mpc file you've created (where the clipping occurs). We can arrange
temporary FTP access for you if you can't find a way to send the file to me.

[Antonski]

Originally Posted by samtaylor

Will players like Banshee or Exaile be able to play the files produced by SV8?

Since Banshee use GStreamer for audio and video decoding, it should play SV8 files. However, you should have installed gst-plugins-bad 0.10.9.1.

2008-04-25  Sebastian Dröge  <slomo@circular-chaos.org>

	* configure.ac:
	* ext/musepack/gstmusepackdec.c: (gst_musepackdec_base_init),
	(gst_musepackdec_init), (gst_musepackdec_dispose),
	(gst_musepackdec_handle_seek_event), (gst_musepack_stream_init),
	(gst_musepackdec_loop), (plugin_init):
	* ext/musepack/gstmusepackdec.h:
	* ext/musepack/gstmusepackreader.c:
	* ext/musepack/gstmusepackreader.h:
	Add support for the new libmpcdec API which magically gets us support
	for SV8 files. Also do some random cleanup. Fixes bug #526905.

As for Exaile, the forthcoming version should suport Musepack:

0.3.0 will support the following formats:
aac (in m4a), mp2, mp3, musepack, speex, vorbis, wma, alac (in m4a), flac, tta, wav, wavpack, 669, amf, dsm, far, it, med, mod, mtm, okt, s3m, spc, stm, ult, xm, ac3, aiff, au, midi, real, shorten

Since SV8 is virtually finalized, Musepack support should include SV8. If this is not the case, you should complain in their forum.

~~