Converting MPC audio files to MP3Edit

Created , updated

Notes made while finding out how to convert MPC files to another format suitable for encoding as MP3 or AAC.

Obtaining mppdec

NOTE: mppdec only runs on PowerPC CPUs (you have to find a very old Mac to run it on).

At the time of writing version 1.95z2 is the latest available version of mppdec.

curl -O http://files.musepack.net/mac/mppdec-1.95z2-mac.tar.bz2
tar xjvf mppdec-1.95z2-mac.tar.bz2
chmod +x mppdec

Options

To show available options I simply typed ./mppdec. The output was:

MPC Decoder  SV7  1.95z2     (C) 1999-2005 Buschmann/Klemm/Piecha/Wolf/MDT

usage:
  mppdec [--options] <Input_File> <Output_File>
  mppdec [--options] <List_of_Input_Files> <Output_File>
  mppdec [--options] <List_of_Input_Files> <Output_Directory>

options:
  --start x   start decoding at x sec (x>0) or at |x|% of the file (x<0)
  --dur x     decode a sequence of x sec duration (dflt: 100%)
  --prev      activate clipping prevention (gain=0,2:title based; 1,3:album based)
  --noprev    deactivate clipping prevention (dflt)
  --scale x   additional scale signal by x (dflt: 1)
  --gain x    replay gain control (0,1:off (dflt), 2:title, 3:album)
  --silent    no messages to the terminal
  --wav       write Microsoft's WAVE file (dflt)
  --aiff      write Apple's AIFF file
  --raw       write RAW file in native byte order
  --raw-le    write RAW file in little endian byte order
  --raw-be    write RAW file in big endian byte order
  --random    random play order (don't use options after this one)

special files:
  -           standard input or standard output
  /dev/null   device null, the trash can
  protocol://[username[:password]@]servername[:port]/directories/file
              file addressed via URL; username, password and port are optional,
              protocol can be ftp, http, rtp. servername can be DNS, IP4 or IP6

examples:
  mppdec Overtune.mpc Overtune.wav
  mppdec "/Archive/Rossini/Wilhelm Tell -- [01] Overtune.mpc" Overtune.wav
  mppdec "/Archive/Rossini/*.mpc" - | wavplay -
  mppdec --start -50% --duration -5% *.mpc - | wavplay -
  mppdec --prev *.mp+ .  &&  cdrecord -v -dao dev=sony -audio *.wav
  mppdec http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/audio/Maire_10bit_48kHz_Dithered.mpc
  mppdec --gain 2 --prev --random /Archive/Audio/  /dev/audio
  mppdec playlist.m3u  /dev/audio

Conversion

mkdir converted
./mppdec --aiff *.mpc converted

The resulting AIFF files are then easily imported into iTunes and then converted to MP3 or AAC. Or, to use an installed copy of FFmpeg as described in "Extracting audio from a DVD":

cd converted
find . -name "*.aiff" -exec /Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -ab 256 -i {} {}.mp3 \;