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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: hamarkus on Oct 21, '05 01:27:31PM

To repeat myself, what is wrong - for archival purposes - with a zip file?



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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: grahams on Oct 21, '05 01:55:09PM

There is nothing wrong with it, the only real "problem" is that you get a lousy compression ratio. FLAC (and Apple Lossless) give you about a 50% reduction in file size while being lossless (you can regenerate a bit for bit replica of the source WAVE file from the FLAC file).

ZIP, on the other hand, while it is good at compressing other types of data (text, etc), it doesn't do so well at Audio files. Do a side-by-side comparison of ZIP and FLAC, and you'll see that you only get a few percent reduction in file size with ZIP while, again, you usually get about a 50% reduction with FLAC. FLAC is able to accomplish this because it is a compression algorithm tuned for working with audio data. Just as ZIP (a general purpose compression algo) is bad at audio (and other file types) compression, FLAC wouldn't do a good job of compressing a text file (if you could manage to shoehorn the tools to try in the first place).

ZIP's compression ratio (for audio files) is so minimal it doesn't even really make sense to ZIP the files at all, your space gains are so low you might as well leave them uncompressed and playable on demand.



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Suggested workflow single-file CD archival?
Authored by: acet on Oct 21, '05 03:36:10PM

To echo the previous responders comments, a ZIP file doesn't compress audio data nearly as well as FLAC. ZIP is a general purpose compression algorithm, while FLAC and others are specifically tooled to take advantage of the typical patterns in audio, resulting in higher compression ratios at the expense of being limited to a specific type of data.

Also, this still doesn't address the issue of capturing the meta info contained in a CD, like the table of contents and precise track layout.



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