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Topic: "Zipping" Music (Read 9040 times) previous topic - next topic
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"Zipping" Music

Monkey audio from what i understand is basically zipping Music like winzip zip a .doc file. When you play it you have to extract.

But why not use other program which also offer great compression like winrar or winAce?? ( i personally thinks winzip is crap ) What makes monkey audio from these compression program??

And what other simliar program that does the silmilar thing as monkey audio?? ( acooding to the monkey audio site it said the it does NOT loss ANY quality. so is there any other format or program that does that ?? )

"Zipping" Music

Reply #1 –
hehe, it functions LIKE zip. It's not the same. You can say it functions like rar or ace too.

It just means that it's lossless like using zip on your files.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #2 –
I'm not an expert, so someone correct me if I'm wrong...

But the way I understand it, Monkey's Audio is a better compression method for audio (WAV) than ZIP, RAR, BZ2 (the best BTW), or whatever, because whereas the latter compression methods are designed for general use, Monkey's Audio is engineered to *specifically* compress _audio_, and is therefore best suited to deal with the unique attributes inherent in digital audio files. Thus, WAVs are smaller using APE than just ZIP.

It's kinda like asking why don't we use ZIP or RAR for graphics instead of PNG. Same answer - the tuned compression method utilizes methods geared for the specific filetype, and better compression is achieved.

Anyhoo, Monkey's Audio is good, but now the official "Hydrogen Audio Sanctioned Lossless Format" is FLAC  (and I've always preferred FLAC anyway... so I'm happy . It's a command-line app, but I believe there are some good Windows front-ends for it (well, that's how Monkey's Audio works anyway... it's just bundled with the front-end.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #3 –
Everything was correct.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #4 –
I found this on the page of Monkey's Audio: http://www.monkeysaudio.com/theory.html It tells you on a basic level how lossless audio compression is achieved. On the FLAC page there is also a documentation but I have not bothered to read it: http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation.html

Digital audio data is relatively easy to predict so you store a start value and start predicting the next one. Compare the prediction with the actual value and store the difference. Predict the following and so on. Due to the good predictability the difference values will be very small, and small numbers in turn can be compressed more efficiently than large ones.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #5 –
You can listen to an .ape file from your hard drive. YOu don't have to decompress it first. Can't do that with zip or rar or ace.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #6 –
Quote
Originally posted by Radboy
You can listen to an .ape file from your hard drive. YOu don't have to decompress it first. Can't do that with zip or rar or ace.


You can. But you must use Winamp with Peter's in_wave and readfile.dll.

And, besides compressing less than MA or FLAC, the files are decompressed completely to memory before playing. What means ~50Mb for a 5min music.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #7 –
Quote
Originally posted by rjamorim
And, besides compressing less than MA or FLAC, the files are decompressed completely to memory before playing. What means ~50Mb for a 5min music.

My God... !  It hardly seems worth it.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #8 –
Of course it's not worth. 

But you CAN play the compressed waves without decoding them to disk first.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #9 –
im ripping very cd im doing with monkeys audio. well first i have 160 gigs of hard drive space, plus monkeys audio has id3 tagging. flac as far as i see it doesnt have anything like id3 tags

"Zipping" Music

Reply #10 –
Quote
You can listen to an .ape file from your hard drive. YOu don't have to decompress it first. Can't do that with zip or rar or ace.


actually you can do this. you jsut ned the XOR archive input plugin from the winamp website

i used to compres my .aac fiels with winrar to save another 6% (lossless) compression.

then i renamed my .rar to .rac and could play it in winamp without needing to decompress or anything

:-)
Sven Bent - Denmark

"Zipping" Music

Reply #11 –
Quote
Originally posted by sven_Bent
 

actually you can do this. you jsut ned the XOR archive input plugin from the winamp website

i used to compres my .aac fiels with winrar to save another 6% (lossless) compression.

then i renamed my .rar to .rac and could play it in winamp without needing to decompress or anything

:-)


wouldnt that be a waste?

"Zipping" Music

Reply #12 –
Quote
Originally posted by sven_Bent
 

actually you can do this. you jsut ned the XOR archive input plugin from the winamp website

i used to compres my .aac fiels with winrar to save another 6% (lossless) compression.

then i renamed my .rar to .rac and could play it in winamp without needing to decompress or anything

:-)


Well, you ARE decompressing them entirely to memory when you play, and I believe it's kinda of a waste of memory for just ~6% compression.

The only compression format where you don't need to decode it entirely to retrieve parts of the data (afaik) is Gzip, via zlib functions, but, in this case, search is REALLY slow.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #13 –
Quote
Originally posted by rjamorim


Well, you ARE decompressing them entirely to memory when you play, and I believe it's kinda of a waste of memory for just ~6% compression.

I wonder why these plugins don't decompress to disk instead of to memory?  It would be a simple matter to use the default %temp% directory, and would eliminate the chance of disk swapping when listening to longer tunes.  Decompressing to memory, uggh...

"Zipping" Music

Reply #14 –
Quote
Originally posted by rjamorim Well, you ARE decompressing them entirely to memory when you play, and I believe it's kinda of a waste of memory for just ~6% compression.


Actually you are decompressiong into af temp folder inside winamp. the decompression takes below 2secs.
nothing you notice unless you have live albums

Besides that using around 8 megs for keeping the uncrompress music in the memmory is not more wasting memmory then when you are keeping you entire .mpc/.mp3 in memmory.

and 8 megs out of 1 gig is not the much memmory.


My point with this input plugin was that YOU don't ned to decompress yuorself. The plugin does it automatically for you once installed correctly


and 6% of 300gigs is stil af saving of 18.gigs

Last time i check hardware prices a 18gigs drive was more expensive then 8 megs of memmory
Sven Bent - Denmark

"Zipping" Music

Reply #15 –
Did I get this? You say, that rar compresses better than Monkey's Audio or is able to compress it even more? I doubt that since Monkey's algorithm is specifically designed for it and most likely better than rar compression for multimedia files.

I'm keeping copies of files that I'm going to burn on Audio CD (as soon as I got all the songs of one genre that I want to have on a CD) as monkey files on my HD which saved me about 25% of HD space. Using the plugin that comes with it I can listen to them from HD (I guess they are decompressed into mem) without problems.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #16 –
What he may have been referring to is this: Take a lossless file and compress it with rar or even zip. It gets SAMALLER. This is a good indication that there is still redundant data being left in lossless files.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #17 –
Quote
Originally posted by sven_Bent
i used to compres my .aac fiels with winrar to save another 6% (lossless) compression.


It looks like he was actually compressing lossy (AAC) files with rar.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #18 –
Quote
Originally posted by Archet
Did I get this? You say, that rar compresses better than Monkey's Audio or is able to compress it even more? I doubt that since Monkey's algorithm is specifically designed for it and most likely better than rar compression for multimedia files.


Nope i didn't say that .  Try reading again i know i spell like shit not having English at my native tounge, but I'm retty shure that was not what i typed.


Quote
]Originally posted by TesIt looks like he was actually compressing lossy (AAC) files with rar.


Yes that was it
Sven Bent - Denmark

"Zipping" Music

Reply #19 –
I got it. Still I think it's quite weird that rar can still compress something out of an already compressed file. Seems aac needs a bit of tuning

"Zipping" Music

Reply #20 –
Try it on an ape file sometime.

"Zipping" Music

Reply #21 –
I think the main reason is that audio codecs compress in blocks, and thus only eliminate redundancy within the blocks.  General-purpose compression programs generally search for redundancy throughout the whole file, which (most) audio codecs will not take advantage of...

"Zipping" Music

Reply #22 –
Quote
Originally posted by Delirium
I think the main reason is that audio codecs compress in blocks, and thus only eliminate redundancy within the blocks.  General-purpose compression programs generally search for redundancy throughout the whole file, which (most) audio codecs will not take advantage of...

If that's the case, we need more 2-pass audio encoders that can check for general redundancies (among other things).  After all this time, most encoders are still single-pass, and I wonder why (?).

"Zipping" Music

Reply #23 –
Because otherwise (non-block oriented compression) you'd break streaming.

--
GCP

"Zipping" Music

Reply #24 –
Just out of curiosity, do lossless encoders do block-oriented or full-file compression?