anyone use WinUHA for compressing .wav's?

[cedric]

i've just tried it out for fun.
and it's REALLY easier to send bigger wav files now - for mastering, new mixes or just plain old easier.
ofcourse the recipient has to have WinUHA too.

if you don't know it:
it's like WinRAR or winzip - it's just WAAAYY better at compressing the files.
an example:

with this "custom command line:" in the program
a -r- -ed- -pr -m3 -mm+ -md+ -md32768 -b1024
i got a 2.953kb file down to 451kb

if you do the math..hmmm... a "normal" 3 minute/3.000kb mp3 file would be a sixth of its size.
WAY faster for sending those pesky .wav's over the net.

anywho - thought i'd just throw this bone out there.
i can't hear any difference. - and why should there be.
granted, it's more than zero's and one's,- but there's no difference here.

now who's making a small VST to pack-up ALL your session files into one big
(hehe... small ;) ) WinUHA file? :)

[Pedro Itriago]

I went to their home page but could not find any info about it being losy or losless.

[johndale]

Your playing with fire compressing audio files. I've seen some unhappy people because of it. I'd be carefull. Why? I don't know the tech jargon, maybe someone else can do that.
John

[JoergReiher]

uharc is a file archiving format and so it's lossless. It can be compared to zip, 7z, rar and so on. It is said that the compression ratio is better than the compression ratio of the other archiving formats.

There's a special "multimedia compression" switch, which allows higher compression rates for audio and image data compared to the "normal" zip, rar and so on.

Generally I can't see any "playing with fire" issues if you compress files, especially if you keep the originals and just use the compressed archive for "shipping".

The biggest problem I can see is that the uharc is still in the zeros regarding the version of the software, so there may be some bugs left. That of course can endanger your data:-)

For audio only compression there are some lossless alternatives out there:
Monkey Audio's Ape
FLAC
...
They have a very high lossless compression ratio and the compressed files can be played directly with the most (good) media players (Winamp, Foobar2000...)

[Naturally Digital]

Generally I can't see any "playing with fire" issues if you compress files, especially if you keep the originals and just use the compressed archive for "shipping".Couldn't it actually be more secure than sending uncompressed wav's since the compression algos can use checksums to check for transmission errors?

They have a very high lossless compression ratio and the compressed files can be played directly with the most (good) media players (Winamp, Foobar2000...)Is it also possible to blow these back out to their original, uncompressed formats? I've been meaning to take a closer look at flac and monkey's...

[Cary B. Cornett]

Is it also possible to blow these back out to their original, uncompressed formats?
That is, in fact, exactly the point of the lossless compression formats. I have used FLAC this way, for example. The compressed file expands to an EXACT copy of the original source file, and the process can be repeated any number of times with no quality losses.

[AudioAstronomer]

Last check rar seems to be the way to go for wav most of the time... I had issues with it but it seems to be rocking hard now. :)

[Craig Allen]

Robert, what kind of issues did you have with it? The last time I tried the demo, I was having all kind of corrupt archive issues and gave up. The developer claimed it was my machine, but the machine was fine for anything else.

[Naturally Digital]

I spent a little time tonight checking out some lossless codecs, LPAC, Monkey's Audio etc. I still need to test FLAC and WavPack but I came across this: http://wavpack.gl.tter.org/

LPAC had a problem with a 560MB file (CRC errors) so I've emailed the developer. Smaller files worked fine. FYI, there's a windoze front end for it now.

The WavPack option to create a self-contained .exe sounds useful.

Monkey's seems very cool but I wish you could add more codecs to the 'external' menu. Having said that, it's great that it offers choices. I think I'll get a lot of use out of this app.

Makes me wonder if it might be nice to have a lossless codec native plugin for SAWStudio. The more I think about it, I'd probably make good use of it.

Long live open source!

[Tree Leopard]

I spent a little time tonight checking out some lossless codecs, LPAC, Monkey's Audio etc. I still need to test FLAC and WavPack but I came across this: http://wavpack.gl.tter.org/ ....

Makes me wonder if it might be nice to have a lossless codec native plugin for SAWStudio. The more I think about it, I'd probably make good use of it.

Long live open source!
I'd love to see "render to wavpack" implemented in SAW! Out of the lot, it's by far the best. Thanks to Robert who mentioned it here a few months ago.

Andre