sfpack

[Doug Nelson]

What's the advantage of sfpack over zip or rar? Are there sf players that can read sfpack files without unpacking?

[aMUSEd]

It's optimised for soundfonts. Because of this it compresses and decompresses better than anything else. I just tested Winrar and SFPack on a 35 MB soundfont - Winrar took 1 minute 20 seconds at maximum compression and came to 22.2MB, whearas SFPack took less than 30 seconds and came to 18.5. It expands even quicker. It's also much faster and slightly better at packing than SFArk and consumes a lot less CPU resources than any SFArk or WinRar. SFark is terribly slow and prone to unpacking arrors - SFPack is 100% reliable in my experience. I suppose the only advantage of WinRar would be if you are concerned about degradation if archiving to CD as it can be set to error check and contain a recovery record. However if you are backing up lots soundfonts to CD and want to protect them you could always use something like HKSFV to do the same for the whole lot at once or even pack with SFPack them Winrar them too.

I haven't tried Winzip but I know that WinRar is better for multimedia files anyway so it's a better comparison.

I wish there was something that could read them directly - it would be cool as they are a lot smaller and it is lossless compression. I seem to recall something was being developed that could read SFArk files at one time but I doubt it's been continued. Maybe Rene could incorporate SFPack file support into SFZ

[Doug Nelson]

You there, Rene?

[garret]

There's a huge disadvantage to sfpack and sfarc, though... they're windows-only, proprietary formats.

If you don't use maximum compression (which doesn't help much anyway), RAR is nearly as fast as sfpack. Personally, I think the cross platform compatiblity and long-term safety of format are worth the extra 10% in file size.

RAR isn't open-source, but there is some source code available.. so I don't think the format will go away any time soon.

-Garret