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Topic: insane setting of mpegplus (mpc) (Read 4565 times) previous topic - next topic
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insane setting of mpegplus (mpc)

About 5 months ago I was really into mpegplus, testing it with my friend Nicolaus in Germany and really getting excited about it.

But then life has a way of eating up your time...planning for marriage working overtime, etc.  So mpegplus went on the back burner...in addition my hardware players (rio volt, philips boombox) only played mp3 so I played around with Lame even though the quality was not as good as mpc.

GETTING TO THE FIRST POINT:
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When I did test mpegplus back then I sometimes noticed that the insane setting didn't always sound transparent....now I am NOT talking about artifacts...what I mean is that the insane encoded track sounded "different".

Its hard to explain but it is almost as if the track was "re-mastered" by an audioengineer during the insane encoding process.. 

Back then I made a little test cd where I took a classical piece of music (1 soft piano song) and encoded in in various formats... (several types of mp3: 256 kbps lame mp3, vbr mp3, mpegplus insane, etc)

I gave it to a guy at work who said he had little faith in psycho- acoustic compression to see if he could pick out the "original cd .wav" which, of course, was also burned on the cd.

He didn't pick out the cd but instead picked out the 256kbps lame encoded mp3.  He said it sounded the best.  He also said something sounded weird about track1, which, unbeknownst to him, was the insane mpegplus file.

I listended to my own "cd" blindly later on (decoded all to .wav files and played them randomly in winamp on the computer) and also "liked" the sound of that 256mp3 better than the original .wav!!!!

Now I don't want you to draw any incorrect conclusions from the above.  I am NOT writing this as a defense of mp3 or an attack on mpc..  In fact, I clearly agree mpc destroys mp3 in quality.

What puzzles me however, is the above phenomenon which SOMETIMES happens... I believe (because i experienced it) that somehow sometimes a very high bitrate mp3 can sound better than the original... 

But how can that be possible?

Maybe some of you have insight...

The best I can come up with is that some cds are not equalized perfectly (or at least are not equalized in such a way that pleases all people) and the mp3 might throw out some frequencies that actually (sometimes) results in a better "eq'd" like sound for that particular individual and so he or she likes it better....

GETTING TO THE SECOND POINT:
-----------------------------------------

Although I haven't tested mpegplus -insane in a while...
has anybody here noticed in the last few months the phenomenon I mentioned above:

Namely that once in a while an insane encoded track sounds "different" (not artifacts, but just different) than the original?

Can anybody explain what they think causes it?

Thanks,
RD

insane setting of mpegplus (mpc)

Reply #1 –
Quote
Originally posted by RD
What puzzles me however, is the above phenomenon which SOMETIMES happens... I believe (because i experienced it) that somehow sometimes a very high bitrate mp3 can sound better than the original...


I don't think it's so hard to understand really.  It's just an example of what you actually prefer in a sound.  Another, probably more extreme example of this could easily happen with some of the music I listen to.  Some of the more harsh electronic stuff has quite a bit of rapid and "sharp" transients which some people seem to find as being unpleasant.  If you encode this to mp3, these transients get smeared out, and create a "softer" sound which is more natural sounding and more pleasant to some people.

So it really just depends on what you like about the sound itself.  Obviously no mp3 at any bitrate (or any lossy format at all) is going to be better than the original in terms of accuracy.

Quote
Although I haven't tested mpegplus -insane in a while...
has anybody here noticed in the last few months the phenomenon I mentioned above:

Namely that once in a while an insane encoded track sounds "different" (not artifacts, but just different) than the original?

Can anybody explain what they think causes it?


Without more details it's hard to say.  When you decoded these mpc files, did you have clipping prevention turned on?  This is the culprit probably 95% of the time when people claim to hear "weird" differences in the sound even with -insane like this, so that is the first thing I would look at.

insane setting of mpegplus (mpc)

Reply #2 –
Btw. RD, which encoder version you used for testing back then. Mppenc went though pretty nice tweakings during the 1.7.9 development. I remember testing closer to something like 15 1.7.9alpha versions...
Juha Laaksonheimo

insane setting of mpegplus (mpc)

Reply #3 –
@ Dibrom: you know now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I didn't use "clipping prevention turned on" so your probably correct in saying its most likely the culprit.

@ JohnV: I cannot remember which version I used to encode.... maybe a mature 1.78 or maybe an early 1.79...unfortunatley i think i deleted all the test files after a while...

Anyway the next natural question then is this:

If I wanted to test the best "archival" settings of insane what would be the commanline?

I haven't fooled with mpegplus in a while so please help me out guys.

Also is -standard + a few commandline tweaks good enough nowadays?... standard was always quite good in the past, though I know many like insane....

Thanks,
RD

insane setting of mpegplus (mpc)

Reply #4 –
>>I'm pretty sure I didn't use "clipping prevention turned on" so your probably correct in saying its most likely the culprit.

Umm, if you DIDN'T use clipping prevention, then everything should have been ok. IF it's used, then it may cause "issues".

Hmm, insane archival...If Insane alone is not enough or you feel you could use higher bitrate, try:
-insane -nmt 16 -tmn 32 -bw 20000 -scale 0.98
Juha Laaksonheimo

insane setting of mpegplus (mpc)

Reply #5 –
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insane setting of mpegplus (mpc)

Reply #6 –
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