musepack - anybody tried it?

[xbenchman]

i have been playing with this encoder for a little while and finally encoded about 24 songs. so far i am really impressed. it encodes in vbr only and is much higher a bit rate than the typical 128 song. mine are in the 200 - 224 range. of course, the files are larger but WOW the clarity. i have encoded songs with lame at higher bit rates 192 vbr and i think that this encoder is better.
just my own personal bad ears as the testers.

just wondering if anyone has messed with it and what their thoughts are

if interested the encoder, decoder, and winamp plugin are here.
h**p://www.musepack-source.de/english/down_win.html
from reading the articles Frank Klemm has the codecs optimized.

i used cdex to extract and the encode. used the external muse encoder. they want you to use the standard output but i upped it to xtreme setting. (--xtreme --ms 0 %1 %2) copied these from the command line in cdex

Any comments???

ps the winamp plugin installs with or without winamp. i cut and pasted the .dll into coolplayer and into cdex plugins for the built in player. i left the configuring to the default settings

[RASTABT]

Tanx man.. ok mi give it ah try and hear how bad or good dis ting is seen!
You know wot mi left de dam ting!

[xbenchman]

RASTABT -
the site has front ends to encode and decode - i just got use to using cdex to rip the cd's. you can use any prog to rip and the frontend to encode - if you so desire. or the command line

it comes highly rated and i think it is pretty good. all the encoders have a lot to do with what your ears can or cannot hear and what you like hearing.

just thought i would mention it in case someone has similar tastes as i do - not saying my tastes are better they may be worse. i just think it sounds really good and thought i would share

any comments = please post