MPC Audio Splitter 1.9.1

MPC Audio Splitter is the small filter that lets a Windows media player open a lossless audio file it would otherwise refuse to touch.

It reads the container, finds the audio inside, and hands that stream to whatever decoder your system has - that is the whole job.

Free, 778KB, and it works in any DirectShow player rather than only the one it was written for.

What a Splitter Actually Is

Playing an audio file takes two separate steps, and it helps to know which one is which. First something has to open the file and work out what is inside it, which is the splitter's job. Then something has to turn that compressed data into sound, which is the decoder's job.

MPC Audio Splitter is only the first of those. If a FLAC file will not open at all, this is usually what is missing; if it opens but plays silence or noise, the decoder is the problem instead.

Our guide on how codecs work behind the scenes walks the whole chain from file to speaker if this is new territory.

Which Files It Opens

The filter is built for audio-only containers, the kind that hold music rather than film. These four are the confirmed ones, among others:

• FLAC, the most common lossless format and the one most people are here for.
• Monkey's Audio APE files, which compress harder than FLAC and are common in older rips.
• TTA, a lighter lossless format built for real-time encoding.
• WavPack, which can store a lossy file and a lossless correction alongside it.

Recent releases have also worked on plain WAV handling, including RF64 files that break the old four-gigabyte size limit and Wave64 files carrying ID3 tags. Tags matter more than they sound - a splitter that reads them wrongly is why an album sometimes shows up in your player with no artist name.

What It Does Not Do

This is worth being blunt about, because the wrong expectation here wastes an evening.

• It does not decode anything. That is MPC Audio Decoder, its companion filter.
• It does not send audio to your sound card, and it cannot give you bit-perfect or exclusive-mode output - that is MPC Audio Renderer.
• It does not open films. MKV, MP4 and Blu-ray files need a video-capable splitter, so DTS-HD and TrueHD tracks never reach this filter at all.
• It does not change how anything sounds. Nothing here boosts, equalises or converts - it only opens files.

What to Pair It With

For the decoding half, MPC Audio Decoder is the matching piece from the same project, and the two are designed to sit next to each other.

If you want the output stage handled just as carefully, MPC Audio Renderer is the one that talks to your DAC without the Windows mixer resampling anything on the way.

For video files you still need a container splitter, and LAV Filters is the usual answer because it covers the decoding as well.

If you would rather keep things separate, Matroska Splitter handles MKV and WebM on its own, and MP4 Splitter does the same for MP4.

Films with several audio tracks are easier to live with once MPC AudioSwitcher is in the chain, since it lets you change language or commentary track without reopening the file.

Standalone DTS and AC3 files sitting outside any container are the job of the DTS/AC3 Source Filter, and per-channel surround control lives in AC3 Filter.

One Filter, or the Whole Pack

There are two reasonable ways to solve a "this file will not play" problem, and neither is wrong.

Installing single filters gives you a chain you understand and can take apart when something misbehaves. Installing a pack gives you one download that handles everything at once, configured for you, which is the right call if you would rather not think about filter graphs at all.

If the pack route sounds better, K-Lite Codec Pack is the one most people end up on, and the rest are in the codec packs section.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

The tell is what your file is. If the thing that will not play is a film, a TV episode or anything with a picture, this filter will not help no matter how the audio is encoded.

It is also the wrong tool if you are not sure what the file contains in the first place. Run it through the codec finder first and you will know whether you need a splitter, a decoder, or something else entirely from the audio codecs section.

What Changed in 1.9.1

The filter ships as part of MPC-BE and carries the player's version number, so 1.9.1 is the build from the MPC-BE release of 8 August 2026. For source filters that release added handling for network streams whose Content-Type header carries an extra codecs parameter, which fixes some internet radio and streaming URLs that previously refused to open.

The splitter's own last round of work landed in 1.9.0, in June 2026: support for the RF64 format, a fix for reading channel layout in some WavPack files, ID3 tag support for Wave64 files, and unknown Wave64 chunks are now ignored instead of tripping it up.

Installing It

1. Close your media player if it is running.
2. Run the installer as administrator - it registers the filter for both 32-bit and 64-bit players.
3. Reopen your player and try the file that would not open before.

Nothing to configure afterwards. The filter registers itself with Windows and any DirectShow player picks it up automatically, including MPC-BE, MPC-HC and Windows Media Player.

Quick questions

Download MPC Audio Splitter 1.9.1 and see whether it opens the files that were refusing to play, then be the first to review it - nobody has yet.