MPC file (Musepack)

What is an MPC file?

In short: An MPC file (.mpc) is an audio file in the MPC format. Musepack was tuned specifically for transparency at high bitrates, and in blind listening tests of the early 2000s it regularly beat MP3 and Vorbis. It can be converted to MP3, WAV or FLAC for free in a web browser with iHateFiles, without uploading it.

Musepack, developed from the MPEG-1 Layer 2 codec in the late 1990s.

Musepack was tuned specifically for transparency at high bitrates, and in blind listening tests of the early 2000s it regularly beat MP3 and Vorbis. It arrived just as AAC and Vorbis were gathering momentum and never found an audience.

What MPC is good at

• Excellent quality at around 180 kbps and above
• Free and open
• Well regarded by people who tested it carefully

Where MPC falls short

• Almost no player support
• Poor at low bitrates, which is where the market went
• Development effectively stopped

When to use MPC

Convert MPC to FLAC if you want to keep it, or M4A if you want to play it.

How to open an MPC file

Foobar2000 and VLC.

The thing that usually goes wrong

MPC is lossy, so converting it to FLAC preserves what is there without recovering what was discarded.

Inside a MPC file

Musepack is a lossy format built from the MPEG-1 Layer 2 design rather than Layer 3, and tuned single-mindedly for transparency at around 180 kbit/s. In the listening tests of the early 2000s it consistently beat MP3 and traded blows with Vorbis at those rates.

It never spread, for an unglamorous reason: no hardware player supported it, and the format broke compatibility during development, which cost it the enthusiasts it had. It remains a foobar2000 format, kept alive by people who chose it before AAC settled the argument.