Quote:
Originally Posted by dsteinwedel  I spoke with my programmer about this yesterday. After getting a lesson in how both .zip and FLAC work, I'm a lot more comfortable (assured, in fact) saying that it does do what it says it does: Fully loss-less file compression. [...]
So Capi/Charles, are there programs you recommend that will do bulk encoding/decoding for archival purposes? |
I used Sound Grinder Pro for my library, because it has the best metadata copying of anything I've seen. For my archival, I use the flac command line program with a script that automatically verifies (both inside flac and by doing a decompression and binary comparison) to verify I'm getting exactly what I put in. Actually here's the script...
gist: 244986 - A Shell Script for FLACing a broadcast WAV file and binary-comparing (including all wrapper and metadata) with original- GitHub
I use this for session stuff, where I don't care about library metadata as much as accuracy.
I actually used to use plain-old ZIP for predubs, and you could gain HUGE amounts of hard disk space back because predubs were mostly silence, and ZIP would runlength encode all the zeroes. ZIP is a very safe format because almost every computer on Earth ships with the ability to decompress ZIPs and the file format hasn't changed substantially since 1993.
I'm not as concerend about losing a lossless file to corruption as much as I'm concerend about losing the program I used to compress it. Based on comments here and thinking about it, compression is a great way to make my library more
portable, but it can only be a small part of a larger strategy of making a library
indestructible.