[Flac-dev] FlacPak - Free lossless instrument compression

[Josh Green]

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