Developers: source code revision 475 contains important fixes and some additions since r435 (see log)
A late happy new year to all Musepackers! 2011 is the beginning of many advancements in open software standards and operating system interoperability. A couple of companies are main driving forces behind these developments, but you, the users of open tools, are the real decision makers. Make your voice heard if you want to standardize the audio format that gave you extremely high fidelity, compression and processing efficiency, Replay Gain support, APEv2 tags and more without shoving a single ad or fee at you in a dozen years.
If you are another user unsatisfied by Google's "medium priority" of adding Musepack support to Android, you can add your vote on this thread. You know that Musepack should be included in HTML5, so tell the W3C about it. Even if you want Microsoft's next operating system to support it, tell Microsoft about it, even if it seems unlikely, to say the least, that they will stop ignoring nonproprietary formats. Things are changing and sooner or later, even companies that are a part of major multimedia format monopolies will cave in and support nonproprietary open formats.
As for some news, VLC media player 1.1.6 adds support for Musepack SV8 as well as SV7.
Musepack is an audio compression format with a strong emphasis on high quality. It's not lossless, but it is designed for transparency, so that you won't be able to hear differences between the original wave file and the much smaller MPC file.
It is based on the MPEG-1 Layer-2 / MP2 algorithms, but since 1997 it has rapidly developed and vastly improved and is now at an advanced stage in which it contains heavily optimized and patentless code.
Musepack is not particularly optimized for low bitrates. The encoder was designed to be transparent at the --standard setting, thus little low bitrate tuning has gone into the codec, opposite to that of AAC, Vorbis, WMA and others which focus more on this region. However, as can be seen on the following listening test pages, Musepack is always at the top:
- ff123's 128 kbit/s group listening test
- ff123's second 128 kbit/s group listening test
- rjamorim's 128 kbit/s group listening test
- rjamorim's second 128 kbit/s group listening test
Examples for Musepack's extraordinary quality at higher bitrates can be found on the "High Bitrate Tests" thread on Hydrogenaudio. It can be seen that Musepack had greater success providing indistinguishable results. We encourage you to contribute your results to the above thread, as there is a lack of formal listening tests at high, supposedly transparent bitrates.
SpecFOO2003 is a detailed decoding speed comparison of various audio formats performed by people using foobar2000 on 23 different systems. The formats included are Musepack, Vorbis, MP3, AAC and APE. Other than showing the interesting decoding speed differences between various systems, the test shows that Musepack's decoding speed surpasses all others' by a big margin.