MPC/musepack to go opensource - Maintainer/Developer of MPC XMMS plugin wanted

Hi,

i am Christian and one of the project admins of the audio compression 
format MPC ( musepack / MPEG+ ) and also of the matroska container 
format. I am not a developer and mainly into organisation/PR. This is my 
first email to the XMMS developer ML and i am turning to you people to 
ask for support.

Please allow me to use this email to announce that MPC is now turning 
into an opensource audio compression format. While the decoder always 
was open, the encoder was not in the past. Development on MPC was slow 
recently, but there is hope it will put up speed again. MPC is also 
known as 'musepack' and also as 'MPEG+'. It is based on the MP2 audio 
compression standard and also using subband coding. However, due to its 
highly developed psy model it is currently perceived as the best 
mid/high bitrate ( 128 - 256 kbps ) lossy audio compression format by 
many audio experts, especially by those centered around the 
Hydrogenaudio.org community.

MPC will be hosted on http://corecodec.org , an opensource community 
like sourceforge, but concentrating on multimedia projects. The project 
page is on http://corecodec.org/projects/mpc and most of the available 
sourcecode was uploaded to CVS now already. The license form will be L-GPL.

Reason i am turning to this list is that we are asking the developers 
reading here if anybody might be interested to join the MPC development 
team, mainly to maintain and develop the existing XMMS plugin for MPC, 
but maybe also to care about MPC implementation into other important 
Linux media applications like FFMPEG, mplayer, Gstreamer, Xine, etc. ( 
optional ) . The developer looking into this should have indeep 
knowledge about Linux itself, as well as a basic idea about the most 
important players and encoders for it, and also basics about audio 
compression.

MPC is currently moving from the well accepted SV7 bitstream format to 
the long awaited SV8 version, with the following new goals

- allow using of MPC in video containers, such as matroska
- support more than 2 channels, to allow surround encodings
- further enhancement of encoder performance, especially in the low/mid 
bitrates
- introduce a new encoder structure based on interacting modules, to 
allow improvement of it by different developers, as well as reusing any 
of those modules in other opensource encoder projects
- adding a DRC ( dynamic range compression ) element to the blocks

It is well possible that MPC will leave the basic principle of subband 
coding in future, and introduce a form of transform encoding similar to 
other audio compression formats, but likely not for SV8.

I hope i could wake your interest in participating in MPC development 
and am looking forward to receive emails from you if you want to know 
more about it.

Best regards

Christian
MPC and matroska project admin