Doing a large scale public listening test...
Reply #22 – 2002-12-10 08:24:48
There is a winamp plug-in for .ape file. The one bundled with the Monkey Pack from the official website works perfectly. The sample I sent to you are not 'rare', but exemples for many (hundred) CD I can encode from my library (there are only classical + 1 er-hu disc ). I encoded them with --quality 1.50 approximatly, in order to reach the 64 kbps needed for : · comparison with other formats · mpc behaviour at low bitrate, actually. Mpc in general seems to work differently than other formats. Continuous tone need much bitrate than a signal interrupted by a strong energy one [sorry for bad description]. This is not annoying for an audiophile encoding [size doesn't matter too much], but when priority to size is given, this is a real problem. I tried to find a track with a 'pure' tonal instrument, and followed by the same signal, but with a drum supperposed. I find one in a Faith No more album (Midnight cowbow , track 13 from Midlife Crisis ). The 14 first seconds are dedicated to accordion ; I isolate them in a single file. I isolate the following 14 seconds (accordion + drums & cymbals), more complex in appearance. Then , I encode the two passages [same size in .wav] with different codec in VBR, in order to prove that mpc will be the one to allocate more bitrate at the first sample. SAMPLE 1 mpc --thumb : 128 kbps [229 kb] vorbis -q1 : 70 kbps [125 kb] aac PsyTEL -radio : 72 kbps [129 kb] mp3pro VBR 60 : 61 kbps [110 kb] Fastenc VBR[nero]: 84 kbps [150 kb] SAMPLE 2 mpc --thumb : 114 kbps [204 kb] -11% vorbis -q1 : 80 kbps [143 kb] +14% aac PsyTEL -radio : 90 kbps [161 kb] +24% mp3pro VBR 60 : 78 kbps [141 kb] +28% Fastenc VBR[nero]: 98 kbps [175 kb] +16% I had a good feeling. MPC allocate in a different way the bitrate. Maybe a different behaviour in masking (don't know, I understand anything in psycho-accoustic). Now, just imaging a whole album, with no drums, no attacks (for exemple, all string quartetts, all violin sonata, all flute music or quite symphonic music....), and it seems to be difficult to obtain with mpc (at least the SV7 1.14 beta and previous) a competitive challenger for vorbis, mp3pro or aac (note that I haven't listen to the files I encode ; I just know that mpc at 80 kbps will be the worse of all [-qual 1.99 gave 75 kbps for the first sample, --qual 2 = 97 kbps /// --qual 1.99 = 58 kbps with sample 2, and 85 kbps at --qual 2, but is not awful]) I suppose that mpc needs not only more tweaking in order to compete (or beat) vorbis and aac, but change his internal behaviour. Actually, all other formats are much better for classical (in general) than mpc at 60-80 kbps. N.B. for hans-jürgen : I doesn't think that PNS responsable is for the 'washing-machine sound' you can heard with the file I sent to you and to Case. You can disable pns with --pns 0 if you want to compare. EDIT : the whole track at --thumb with mppenc 1.14 is only 99 kbps. I'm not sure that a listening test at xx kbps is useful if the xx is based on a small and critical sample, except for a streaming purpose.