Support Rar Compression

Ideas & suggestions
1

rubberband remix, packed with ZIP (best): 6.0 mb
rubberband remix, packed with RAR (best, solid): 3.5 mb

I’m sure Renoise songs and well, everything would benefit from supporting RAR compression

Or are there licensing issues etc.? And what about 7-zip?

edit: well, as noted below, packing as rar is not really an option, but that still leaves two possible improvements: unpacking rar (mostly for xrnx but yes, why not also for .xrns files, if someone wants to create them by hand), and packing as 7zip.

2
3

I’m not talking about packing as rar though, I mean unpacking them. That is more freely available than the encoding if I’m not very much mistaken?

And then there’s 7zip.

Let’s face it, zip is 5000 years old and it shows.

4

Nice idea. It gets my +1.

5

seriously, guys: is anyone of you still snailing around with a 28.8k modem?
+/- 2.5 megs is a differnce of seconds, or minutes in worst case.
I guess it’s highly unlikely that a script will exceed some 100megs, even with external components included…
If there are no licensing problems for rar it wouldn’t hurt to implement it, though. But if there are, well, it’s not a tragedy.
just my two cents…

6

To make the rubberband smaller, you probably can compress the included binaries with some exe compressor.

Edit: That was bad idea. It actually makes the packaged file larger, not smaller.

7

'cactly. which is my whole point. well, except you people seem to keep forgetting about 7zip… which as I just found out is LGPL and actually includes code to unpack RAR, which in turn is free, as long as you don’t use it to reverse engineer the RAR compression. This way we’d just need 7zip to support RAR as well as 7zip, all handled with libraries that have already implemented by many, many free programs. If Renoise supports compression, why not support good compression, too :D

It’s not like there are any compatibility issues, you can still pack your stuff with zip, and if 7zip has a bug in a release, people can fall back to .zip, or even repack the xrnx files they already have. But it’s not like 7zip is some strange program nobody ever heard of or supported…

These are the Renoise requirements:

Windows 2000, XP, Vista or Windows 7 - 32 or 64 bit
Mac OS X 10.4.0 or later
32-bit x68-based Linux distro with GCC 4.X libs, X.org 7.1+, preferably real-time kernel

so yeah, how about modern compression, too! would fit right in.

Talking like someone who neither has to upload the stuff (which tends to be much slower, and which you do over and over and over again…), nor host it :P

When compiling an xrnx it’s just a pity that you have to switch the the high end tool into “let’s pretend I’m from the 80’s” mode to produce a feeble .zip, that’s all.

8

RAR is still an non-free file format. Implementing this would be rather problematic.

.XRNS is zip too, but you don’t mind cause .XRNS is created transparently. :P

9

RAR compression != RAR decompression!

RAR compression = not free.

RAR decompression = free, as demonstrated by 7zip and linux archivers which support it…! We basically have there is the option to support 7zip compression, 7zip decompression, and RAR decompression (and even the option to have that all in one package via 7zip)

Oh yeah, you think? I would love to have my songs compressed with 7zip ;)

Actually, when trying with rar and 7zip I was surprised Renoise doesn’t understand it already, that’s why I posted this. Just because it’s an audio app doesn’t mean it has to neglect everything else out of principle or something… free tech improvement = good.

10

They use non-free libraries for decompression. There are no free libraries that can support RAR3 format.

11

that still would leave 7zip, which is LGPL period, but actually:

what do you mean by free?

http://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm
http://www.rarlab.com/rar/unrarsrc-3.9.10.tar.gz

yeah, that’s by definition “not free software”, because it contains this “restriction”… but in reality, it’s free. Free as in beer, obviously, but that’s good enough? No license costs, and no demands besides having disclaimers in docs and source, and not trying to reverse engineer… I think that’s a very small price to pay.

12

Johann, are the filesize-differences of a packed xrns really that large, even when the samples in the xrns are flac:ed? Can you rar a flac-file and get almost half the size?

13

This is an xrnx plugin, not a renoise song ;)

(and while 7zip still packs it much better than zip, it’s not as good as RAR, but I forgot the exact size… 4.6 mb or something)

Yeah, for flac packed samples there is no real difference, but a song also has a song.xml and that responds very well to a better compressor.

14

Why would adding support for 7zip mean throwing zip out?

15

Well XML is also the worst format in terms of file size. But we still do it, because of it’s wide adoption, and simple usage. Same with ZIP. XRNS/XRNX/XRNI are NOT file compression formats, they are just based on popular open format which makes the files accessible for everyone.

If we wanted to base the file formats on XRNX i doubt we would go for half assed solution of only allowing uncompression. Renoise should be able to write it’s own files too.

I don’t see any point going through all this stuff because of few lousy megabytes. Sorry.

16

compress as zip or 7zip, uncompress as… a LOT more. That’s how most programs do it, they read more than they write. Like Renoise, which reads .xm files but does not write them. That’s not half-assed haha… just like unpacking rar but not packing it isn’t. but yeah, status quo wins once again :lol:

17

The world doesn’t need a proprietary archivation format, so supporting it is a bad idea. It’s nicer to support formats that there are actually good compressors for on every operating system, and it’s not clever to support reading a format you are not allowed to write (what if you find out you want to add that later?). Use zip for compatibility or 7z for good compression.