Slashdot Mirror
New MPC Decoding Library And Updated Homepage
Dcoder writes "The MPC codec has finally completed its transition
to the open source world by making Musepack.net its
new official home, featuring a complete collection
of tools, plug-ins and codec binaries (Linux, Win32
and Mac OS X) and the sourcecode to the complete SV7-1.15r
codec source. Additionally, Peter Pawlowski has recently
completed his work on an LGPL-licensed portable
mpcdec library, which comes with floating and fixed-point
math modes and performs at around 10x realtime on a Intel
XScale 400Mhz and is even fast enough to bring MPC decoding
to slower ARM chips like the iPod's ARMv4.
Musepack's outstanding quality has been proven only recently
by a public listening test."
Oh well... I guess I will answr my own question. Should have RTFA'd closely.
From the site:
It is based on the MPEG-1 Layer-2 / MP2 algorithms, but has rapidly developed and vastly improved and is now at an advanced stage in which it contains heavily optimized and patentless code.
I am a bit worried about anything that is MPEG. It sounds like it is impossible to conform to mpeg and not be patent-free.
Well. The only thing left is for mplayer to add support, if they have not done so already.
badness 10000
Musepack is a wonderful format. Not only is it quicker to decode than other formats, it's also got the best psycho acoustic model and outperforms pretty much any other codec in bitrates from 128kbit/s above.
Now that the encoder is completely open-sourced and patent free, i'd like to see it adopted more. Foobar2000, the best Windows audio player available, supports MPC natively and there are plugins for everything else.
That's naive at best. Autotools solve a complex problem. They're not exactly elegant at all times (I'm not exactly an m4 cheerleader.), but they're robust enough to handle even very complex build environments and to present basically the same interface to anyone that's regularly building packages from source.
I've yet to see a system that can compete with them in this regard and I have seen things that tried. The results have either been (a) even uglier and/or (b) not general purpose.
Take for example the fact that this tarball requires nasm -- it doesn't tell you that until the build fails and then there's no opportunity to tell you what it is and where you can get it. This would be a relatively simple configure check.
Or what about header and library installation locations? Cross platform library versioning?
Bah, I'll stop there... This is pretty obviously just a troll...