KVR Audio

sonicfire · Post by **sonicfire** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 6:39 pm

hi folks!

does someone know a good packer especially for making WAV-files smaller? i´m searching for something like this for ages now but cant find anything useful

sonicfire · Post by **sonicfire** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:11 pm

no one?

Markleford · Post by **Markleford** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:16 pm

RAR works fairly well.

Monkey's Audio is my preferred lossless compressor for wavs.

- m

sonicfire · Post by **sonicfire** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:20 pm

monkey´s audio? sounds interesting .... will google after it

Jafo · Post by **Jafo** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:35 pm

Howdy. Depends on what precisely you mean, and your purposes. You can encode to MP3, OGG, or, gods help us, WMA, with some loss of quality (allegedly negligible). You can compress for archival purposes with RAR, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, or any similar compression app, but you'll have to decompress before use. Tracktion's lossless compression works nicely, giving about a 2:1 ratio -- which, perhaps not coincidentally, is precisely the ratio found in Shorten (also lossless). Or perhaps you could dither to a WAV with a smaller sampling rate or fewer bits (not recommended). A high bitrate OGG is probably your best bet.

farlukar · Post by **farlukar** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:37 pm

monkey's audio, flac and shorten are the most common.
here's a comparison of a whole bunch of codecs.

jens · Post by **jens** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:46 pm

Monkey's audio is the best currently...

jens · Post by **jens** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:47 pm

Jafo wrote: Tracktion's lossless compression works nicely, giving about a 2:1 ratio -- which, perhaps not coincidentally, is precisely the ratio found in Shorten (also lossless).

Tracktion uses Flac

Warmonger · Post by **Warmonger** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:49 pm

I recommend FLAC if compatibility is at all a concern. More players/programs support it with no need for plugins than any other lossless format I've seen. That said, I use Monkey's Audio for my own CD backups.

Warmonger · Post by **Warmonger** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:53 pm

I've got a particular song that went from 49 MB to 16 MB after compression

Meanwhile, all the other songs on the CD were within 3% of a 2:1 compression ratio.

sonicfire · Post by **sonicfire** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:01 pm

thanks for all you responses!

well i just want to use it for distribution on web. something else like rar or zip that is better on compressing waveforms to keep download-size as low as possible...

(i´m working on a new kind of drum-sampler/sequencer with dozens of waveforms....that´s why i´ve asked

)

jens · Post by **jens** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:04 pm

sonicfire wrote:thanks for all you responses!
well i just want to use it for distribution on web. something else like rar or zip that is better on compressing waveforms to keep download-size as low as possible...

(i´m working on a new kind of drum-sampler/sequencer with dozens of waveforms....that´s why i´ve asked )

then I'd still go for Flac or Monkey's audio - both are free and you could like to a site where people can download the decoder....

Warmonger · Post by **Warmonger** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:13 pm

Zip has pretty useless wave compression. RAR is better, but then you'll have to link to WinRAR since many people still don't know what to do with a RAR file. I'd put everything up using FLAC, and then link to dBpowerAMP, a free audio format converter.

jens · Post by **jens** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:20 pm

Warmonger wrote:Zip has pretty useless wave compression. RAR is better, but then you'll have to link to WinRAR since many people still don't know what to do with a RAR file.

besides .rar has still a bad compression-ratio for audio, even if it is better than .zip (actually .zip is bullshit for everything...)

Jafo · Post by **Jafo** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:31 pm

My spies inform me that Warmonger wrote:Zip has pretty useless wave compression. RAR is better, but then you'll have to link to WinRAR since many people still don't know what to do with a RAR file. I'd put everything up using FLAC, and then link to dBpowerAMP, a free audio format converter.

I agree with all of that -- modulo my personal preference for OGG -- but I still think the best way to learn is to try literally everything. Besides, which method gives the best results for a specific files is not necessarily predictable; I've had files the ZIP did a better job with than bzip2 (even with "--best"!).

Anyway, I'll give FLAC a try. Thanks for the tip.

crunching/packing WAV-files?