If you want to "tune" quality, except for the Quality-Switch (--quality 5.5 , --quality 7.2 , ...). Just use the Quality-Switch for any kind of fine-tuning as it gives the most optimized quality possible.

telephone & and thumb

the "telephone" and "thumb" profiles are usefull to encode low quality, mono, or vocal-only [audio book, comedy, spoken word records, etc.] audio. these profiles are not recommended for average audio encoding and should only be used in situations where using the other, higher quality encoding profiles would result in unnecessary bloat.

radio

the "radio" profile is offered as a lower quality alternative to the "standard" profile. using "radio" will result in lesser quality audio and a smaller filesize. "radio" can be usefull for greater quality audio in the same situations as with the "telephone" or "thumb" profiles. also, if you have poor hearing, radio can be used as a space saving alternative to using "standard" for most music - although music that is heavy on guitar [heavy metal, punk, loud rock] may still necessitate the use of the "standard" profile.

standard

the "standard" profile is the default setting. "standard" has been the flagship of musepack - being constantly fine tuned to provide nearly all audio samples with perceptual transparency.

extreme

the "extreme" profile has been tuned to supplement "standard" in the event where "standard" does not provide transparencyy [i.e. artifacts are still present]. inadequacies of the standard profile are rare and few, but still exist nonetheless. there are known samples that are a problem for "standard" which are not a problem for "extreme." due to the supplementary nature of the "extreme" profile, this is used [and recommended] in the process of audio trading or sharing such as with a person-to-person [p2p] network.

insane

the "insane" profile is provided to encode the entire bandwidth - a feature that "standard" and "extreme" lack due to the short list of reasons why encoding the entire bandwidth would be a good idea. much of the audio information encoded with "insane" is inaudible to the human ear, making this added content unnecessary in most situations. "insane" defies the idea of psychoacoustic audio compression in a basic sense, but in situations such as transcoding [e.g. changing a musepack file into something else like mp3, aac, or ogg], encoding the entire bandwidth will be advantageous later on. in one sentence: "insane" is a more accurate audio representation, but quite unnecessary in the majority of encoding situations.

braindead

the "braindead" profile was introduced in mppenc sv7 v0.90s by frank klemm to show that "insane" was not the greatest quality achievable through the musepack format. utilizing a similar average bitrate as "insane", the "braindead" profile takes advantage of more generous encoding options to provide the best quality of any of the provided profiles in the musepack format.

See also:
Working with Movkit DVD Ripper Pro