When it was released, in late 2000, the Mafuka format took the audio coding community by storm. It promised - and "delivered" - same quality as MP3 at 1/3 of the file size. It seemed the obscure Dr. Keiji Mafuka had come up with a real breakthrough in multimedia compression.

Soon, people started becoming suspicious. Why did the encoder accept only .mp3 files, and not uncompressed .wav? Why files encoded in one computer wouldn't play in other machines? How come noone ever heard of such breakthrough research going on in Japan?

Soon the truth was revealed: the Mafuka encoder was just a big joke. It took the MP3 file, divided it in three, renamed the first part to .mfk and hid the other parts very well. At playback time, the files were merged together again. That's why a file encoded in one computer wouldn't work in another one.

An interesting detail is that "Mafuka" is believed to actually mean an english slang, "mother f**ker".

You can find a mirror of the Mafuka page here.


Date: 2000-11-20
Version: 1.0beta
Interface: Graphical User Interface
Platform: Win32
Download: mfk_install.zip - 1418Kb

Big thanks to Elohe for providing this encoder