Source Elements has announced the release of Source-Zip for Mac OS X.

Source-Zip allows for audio projects to be compressed, then easily uncompressed, using lossy or lossless codecs for easy and quicker delivery via the Internet. It is useful for file collaboration, archiving, and final delivery of projects and is 100% automatic and transparent to any audio workstation including Pro Tools.

Source-Zip solves a specific problem: you need to send your audio session to another location, but you don't have the time or bandwidth it takes to send such a large file. Source Elements says "Until now, you couldn't just zip audio files using the zip software that is built into your computer, because audio files contain complex data that does not respond to standard 'zip' compression. If you compress WAV or AIFF audio files using other compression software you'll lose all meta-data that is required by your audio program to quickly re-open sessions and start working".

Source-Zip allows you to easily take all of your audio files in your session folder, zip them into a much smaller size using either the latest in MP4 compression technology or Apple's Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) and then easily unzip them without requiring Source-Zip on any other computer. Source-Zip outputs a self-extracting file that you can email or ftp to someone quickly, and once unzipped it recreates your session files and enclosed folders exactly as they were - including audio meta-data that applications like Pro Tools need to recognize the files, and any other files that were zipped along with your audio.

Source-Zip is priced at $48 and is available immediately for download. A 7-day fully-functioning trial is available.