I use this: https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd

It has more compression algorithms than standard 7-zip, some work better for certain filetypes.

 

surprised to see this discussion, haven't heard this discussed since late 1990's. as hard drives became orders of magnitude bigger, compression has become much less of an issue for storage.

most use of compression is now in streaming and shared internet services.

There always has to be the consideration of lossy compression versus loseless compression.

as we know mp3 compresses sound by throwing out the shit we can't hear, problem is everybody has different levels of hearing loss, so one man's pina colada is another man's day old guiness. and mp3 compression is recursive so you can keep compressing until you have a 1 bit file also known as silence.

as always, the "BEST" compression is the one that works for you. so it will vary from use case to use case, from content type to content type
to the amount of storage or transmission bandwidth available for your use case.

the best compression is a Unicorn, but we love to chase mythic beasts..

 

While I agree with you (in most part anyway), and let's have not have a discussion about the merits of various lossy compression, this discussion here seems to be about stuff that can't be lossily compressed, like application data, text, and so on, is it not? Lossless compression can be compared because there's zero subjectivity.

But I'm hypercranky and pedantic right now so I'd be besides myself if I didn't point out a technical inaccuarcy here.. .

mp3 is not "recursive", a mp3 frame is the same size always and add mp3 header(s) on top of that. The smallest sample rate is 8kHz and it's always 16bits (I suppose there might be nonstandard extensions to this, but...) so even in silence the file size would be somewhere around one kilobyte (round up to your block size). Besides, a 1-bit audio file would make no sense, either you're encoding heavily asymmetrical square waves, or square waves (but not silence).

 

so an mp3 of one hand clapping will always be 1kb?

 

That is true for PCM. But not for DSD. "1-Bit" conversion, "Bitstream" or "single-bit", as it is also called. It makes sense.

 

Last edited: Jan 21, 2024

Fair, but I don't think 1bit encoders/decoders exist.

 

Very true

Shit, are NFTs still in fashion? I'm going to look into selling some taoist mp3s. Or empty frames, but that's by the by.

 

To be honest, I don't know what you mean. DSD is more of a niche format, but there are plenty of devices (and software converters) that can encode and/or decode 1-bit signals. My AV reciever, for example, can decode DSD. But I have never used this feature.

 

I don't know enough about oversampling, but for mp3 it doesn't make sense, as the bitrate is limited to 320kbit/sec so I don't think it would possible to encode MHz rate data (with frequency filtering). At least the spec doesn't support it. How are DSD streams compressed, if any? Perhaps some non-standard extension? I don't know to be honest with you.

I've always thought the whole oversampling business was not because you can add more data to the stream, but to make ADC better. But we're going so far off topic and I'm going so far out of my knowledge I think imma gonna stop here

 

I am anything but an expert when it comes to lossless data compression methods. But I think this is the best answer. I once read that compression algorithms handle certain types of data differently, so it depends very much on the content of an archive which algorithm leads to the best result.

 

ZST (ZST or ZSTD archivers) makes the smallest archives of all the archivers known to me. But it's sooooo slow, and it can only produce solid archives, so it's kinda unusable for people who often view files directly from an archive on a NAS when couple of GBs archive gets transferred over the network every time they want to read a PDF, RTF, TXT, NFO file in it. But if you want the archive to be compressed into a smallest possible archive there is, ZST is the one to do it with. There's only one switch that controls the level of compression. -1 to -19 in zstd and -1 to -9 in zst