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Musepack is an audio compression format with a strong emphasis on high quality. It's not lossless, but it is designed for transparency, so that you won't be able to hear differences between the original wave file and the much smaller MPC file.
It is based on the MPEG-1 Layer-2 / MP2 algorithms, but since 1997 it has rapidly developed and vastly improved and is now at an advanced stage in which it contains heavily optimized and patentless code.
Musepack is not particularly optimized for low bitrates. The encoder was designed to be transparent at the --standard setting, thus little low bitrate tuning has gone into the codec, opposite to that of AAC, Vorbis, WMA and others which focus more on this region. However, as can be seen on the following listening test pages, Musepack is always at the top:
- ff123's 128 kbit/s group listening test
- ff123's second 128 kbit/s group listening test
- rjamorim's 128 kbit/s group listening test
- rjamorim's second 128 kbit/s group listening test
Examples for Musepack's extraordinary quality at higher bitrates can be found on the "High Bitrate Tests" thread on Hydrogenaudio. It can be seen that Musepack had greater success providing indistinguishable results. We encourage you to contribute your results to the above thread, as there is a lack of formal listening tests at high, supposedly transparent bitrates.
SpecFOO2003 is a detailed decoding speed comparison of various audio formats performed by people using foobar2000 on 23 different systems. The formats included are Musepack, Vorbis, MP3, AAC and APE. Other than showing the interesting decoding speed differences between various systems, the test shows that Musepack's decoding speed surpasses all others' by a big margin.