Musepack.net - 2009.03.01

Musepack SV8 has been finalized and the first stable release is out.
The new stream version offers many improvements over SV7, to users and application developers alike.


Changes:

- Container-independent format. An SV8 MPC is a container file for a Musepack stream. Raw stream encoding is possible.
- Packetized stream allows muxing into audio and video containers (e.g. MKA, MKV, NUT)
- Sample-accurate, fast seeking independent of file length
- Sample-accurate cutting
- Chapters
- No internal clipping. --noxlevel flag removed, not needed anymore
- Bitstream compressed by highly optimized canonical huffman tables - 2% smaller files and faster decoding
- Streamable
- Cleaned up and rearranged code - libmpcdec, libmpcenc, libmpcpsy


Package contents:

mpcenc - Musepack SV8 encoder. Accepts WAV and lossless source files.
mpcdec - Musepack SV8 decoder. Decodes MPC to WAV or checks for stream errors.
mpcgain - ReplayGain calculator using our new ReplayGain library.
mpcchap - SV8 chapter editor, for embedding chapters into MPC files using info in chapterfile.ini or cue files.
mpccut - SV8 stream cutter, for losslessly cutting stream segments based on selected start/end samples.
mpc2sv8 - Musepack SV7 to SV8 converter. Losslessly converts MPC files encoded by an SV7 encoder.


Special thanks to:

Nicolas Botti, the main person behind SV8 development, for a massive amount of work during a period of several years.
Peter Pawlowski, for important performance and stability related contributions.
grimmel, for SVN and Trac maintenance and hosting.
Genju, for non-stop binary compilations, testing and support.
Igor Janos / MONOGRAM, for SV8 DirectShow decoder and splitter development, and support.
Andree Buschmann, for code optimizations through his Rockbox efforts,
and everyone who contributed patches, offered advice and helped make the format stable and robust.


Windows users can use the latest foobar2000 which already fully supports SV8's features.