Musepack and rockbox

[drmrbrewer]

Is musepack still actively being developed within the rockbox project, or is it seen to be a bit of a dead-end technology that will gradually slip away from being supported?  I've seen various comments on the future (or not) of musepack, and am curious to know how it is perceived in the rockbox developlment community.

Thanks,

Mike

[Genre9mp3]

Hi Mike and welcome to the Rockbox forums

Though I'm not a developer, I cannot see why musepack would ever slip away from being supported. There are lot of codecs that Rockbox currently supports and as far as I can tell, there is always an effort for supporting them more efficiently, improving the decoders or even add new ones.

As for musepack itself, here are some recent commits to give you an idea:

1 Sep - Put Musepack output data array back in IRAM for faster DSP processing.
1 Sep - Support for Musepack SV4-6 stream files.
31 Aug - Musepack seeking support. Decoder should also be faster.
29 Apr - Fix the first-frame memmove from pretending the data is interleaved, which it isn't anymore. This should fix all remaining gapless problems with Musepack.

[Davide-NYC]

Musepack is one of the better optimized decoders (for coldfire targets at least) and may be the fastest decoder for a lossy format at any particular bitrate. So in that sense it could be the MOST developed format for Rockbox.

[saratoga]

MPC is general will probably fade away now that the developer has lost interest in it.  However, its still an amazing format, and perhaps one of the best lossy encoders yet made.  I can't see rockbox losing support for it.

[drmrbrewer]

Well, it's good to see that musepack is still actively supported within rockbox.  I am a big fan of musepack, but I find it frustrating that there no longer seems to be any will to push it forward and keep it actively developed.  (When was the last update to the basic encoder??)

With all the developments and improvements being made to other codecs, it seems that musepack is being left behind.  Like many others I'm sure, I think to myself that I shouldn't be causing myself any more trouble than I need to by sticking with a dead-end technology (however good it may be or may have been), and I'm sorely tempted to go with the AAC flow.  But something is keeping me back with musepack.  If it's just nostalgia, then perhaps I should be cold-hearted and just let go.

Thanks,

Mike