Josh Green
2004-Sep-10 16:45 UTC
[Flac-dev] FlacPak - Free lossless instrument compression
Thought I'd send an update on FlacPak a file format for compressing instrument files (although its more generically a method of compressing files containing binary and audio with most of the smarts being in the encoder file handlers). It uses zlib for compressing the binary data and FLAC (of course :) for compressing the audio. There is now a CVS tarball of libInstPatch which contains a flacpak utility for compressing and decompressing SoundFont, DLS and GigaSampler files. Already fairly good compression has been observed and there are still several optimizations that could be made for the current file handlers (better detection of split stereo samples, selecting different FLAC parameters depending on sample properties, etc). If anyone is interested you can find it at: http://swami.sourceforge.net/flacpak.php I'm fairly confident in the current format design so it will probably be finalized soon. Right now I'm sifting through a bunch of statistics I have in a MySQL database of results of compressing various samples with different FLAC parameters. Nothing real conclusive yet though except that the best choice of block size seems to depend a lot on the actual sample data. I imagine some of the other parameters like min/max rice partition order improve things, I only just started getting into stats with other parameters besides block size. Cheers. Josh Green