Musepack

See also: Compression | Audio Formats | MP3

Home Page: http://www.musepack.net

File extension: .MPC

Musepack is an open source audio compression format with a strong emphasis on high quality. It’s not lossless (its lossy), but it is designed for transparency, so that you won’t be able to hear differences between the original wav file and the much smaller MPC file.

The format 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 patentfree code.

Foobar2k, XMMS, Jetaudio, and VLC play mpc files out of the box. A plugin is available for Winamp. A Directshow filter is available for Windows Media Player.

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