winzip or winvelcro

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rats

rats

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Has anyone encountered any problems archiving wav files or session data when using winzip? I'm finding that I save about 2/3rds the disk space by zipping up the files I'm not working on, but I'm skeered I might fuck shit up in the compression/ decompression. Is this a whack paranoid rant or am I whack for zipping a file? Have they come out with winvelcro yet, because I hear that is safer and easier to use?;)
 
I don't really see any harm in compression and decompression...but don't really do it that often...it takes so long to compress large files anyways

I prefer win rar over winzip...it will read *.zip and *.rar files...and compresses files more
 
Considering Winzip (aka the original Pkzip with a Windows interface) has been around now for 10 years and is a induatry standard and used by most of the computer world, I don't think you have anything to worry about.
 
Try Monkey's Audio compression program. It's designed for Wav files (up to 24/96) and can compress the files up to 50%. It's lossless, free, and is a one-man operation like N-Track (i.e. great support from the author). http://www.monkeysaudio.com
Good luck!
 
Hmmm. Thnaks for the responses. The first two sounds good. But Gordone threw me there.

In saying that the monkey is lossless, are you implying that there is a loss with winzip? Because if there is no loss or corruption with winzip, and I can compress 65% with it, why would I want the 50% that monkey offers?
 
winzip is losseless too .

..but if the monkey's audio compressor thing is made for audio , hell then why not give the developpers a bit of glory and give it a try.

I'm at work, but anybody want to compress a file with both Winzip and Monkey and compare the two??

gotta give em a fair shake ey?
 
Hey Rats,

Lossless means that decompressing the file results in the original file. MP3 is a lossy compressions scheme, once you compress, you can't get back the original file (unless you saved the original file somewhere). WinZip uses lossless compression - how else would you be able to unzip that word file your co-worker just sent you?

The difference between using Monkey and WinZip is
1)Monkey's is designed especially for wav files, and compresses much more than WinZip

Oops - I just re-read your response, and it seems that you're getting pretty good compression ratios with WinZip, so there goes reason #1. I've never tried compressin WinZip, I just assumed that it wouldn't do a good job of compressing wav data.

2)Monkey's provides a Winamp plug-in that allows you to play the compressed file without decompressing it first.

Anyway, you shouldn't be worried about losing your wav files with winzip. We use it all the time at work for zipping Office documents and I've never heard anyone scream "oh no, the software specification zip file is corrupt!"
Good luck!

-Evan

PS - I just figured out the WinVelcro joke, I've been a little slow lately!

rats said:
Hmmm. Thnaks for the responses. The first two sounds good. But Gordone threw me there.

In saying that the monkey is lossless, are you implying that there is a loss with winzip? Because if there is no loss or corruption with winzip, and I can compress 65% with it, why would I want the 50% that monkey offers?
Click to expand...
 
i just went to the monkey audio site.

they're offering it for free. they have an API for coders. They also plan on going open source!!!

You've got me sold!!!
 
I don't want to worry you Rats, but Pkzip (and Winzip) DOES have a file size limitation, although it's very large. If you get really greedy and try to create say a 1 gig zip file with 10,000 files in it, what will happen is that it will seem to zip fine but when you go to unzip it the program will yak, and your data will be unrecoverable. Now at exactly what point the zip file size or contents cause it to go "tilt" I don't know, I've never pushed it anywhere near that hard.

Typically there's not much compression you can get out of audio data, it's a fairly dense data format to begin with. Unlike text files where you get huge compression.

Also - you might want to check out a program called Wavezip. It is a lossless compressor like Zip that supposedly does a better job on audio data. It can be found arround the web, I know it's at the web site www.gadgetlabs.com (company out of business but web site still up). Since I use Cakewalk and Cakewalk has it's own "Bundle" compressed archieve format, I have not had a need to try it.
 
I think it would be a fun exercise to write a Java GUI for Monkey's Audio. I could write a JNI interface between the GUI and Monkey's DLL. It would help pass the time at work and is more productive than reading the BBS all day! :)

tvaillan said:
i just went to the monkey audio site.

they're offering it for free. they have an API for coders. They also plan on going open source!!!

You've got me sold!!!
Click to expand...
 
RWhite,

I don't believe the Cakewalk bundle format has any data compression going on... file size is nearly equal to the size of the project file plus the size of its component wave data files....
 
Alchuck, you may well be right. Cakewalk will announce "now writing compressed audio" while saving a .BUN file, but the file size is about the same as the sum of the parts. Which may be because there isn't much room to compress the audio, or it may just be a misleading message.
 
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