With sample libraries beginning to get into the multiple GB sizes, I'm just wondering whether there's an efficient way of compressing the .wav format samples into anything else that's both lossless and smaller in size to save hard drive/SSD space? It obviously would also need to be a format that DAWs (especially Ableton) could recognise.

I know Kontakt libraries can be converted to .ncw, but am looking for more general samples.

 

Just limit your collection of Kontakt libs & audio samples to a 2 TB hard drive. How many libraries a man can possibly need? Do you even know all the sounds in your collection?

 

FLAC is pretty small and lossless and Ableton can use it. It does get cached though like MP3s in Live. It's also not as universal as WAV or AIFF.
.APE isn't compatible with Live so I'm not sure why I'm bringing it up. OGG is compatible but that sh!t is lossy.

 

Last edited: Oct 22, 2016

Yes, and it's actually recommended.
WavPack (.wv) would be my choice due to 32bit FP which FLAC doesn't support, and with slightly speedier decoding.

 

Near 50% compression rate AND it loads right into Live.
Thanks for that @Andrew

 

Anyone remember the old shorten (.shn) lossless format? Around way before FLAC, but never really caught on outside of a few live recordings.

 

Did you test it with Ableton, or am I being blind and it says on their site?

Downlaoded the software but still busy compressing Kontakt libraries at the moment

 

At first I said "yey" then I realised that I have no way of previewing wv in finder (with spacebar quick preview) and the sampler that I use the most (Phalanx) is not supporting wv. Can't live without these two.

 

I didn't see anything on their site either. I just converted files of various lengths and threw them into Ableton. For drum loops and hits I recorded it was near 50%. A 495 kb hit was 265 kb after compression. Over 50% in some cases now that I'm working through samples I've recorded.

 

Last edited: Oct 22, 2016

Seems like a waste of time and cpu in a world of 10tb drives and rising...

 

It's actually very fast.
@GangamStyle I understand what your saying. To each his own.

I'm guessing it's dynamics but 70Mb to 30Mb is actually fairly significant.
Bummer they don't load directly into Kontakt.

 

Last edited: Oct 22, 2016

hi dear,
I encountered a similar problem. How do I make my WAV files smaller? I used the dBpowerAmp music converter to turn my music into WAV files, but the size is still huge to send to my friends in emails. That's my problem and I am using this program to compress wav file:http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/compress-wav-file.html you also can try, it is free to download, if you do not like this, you can view this page:https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3339015?tstart=0 cheers

 

For backup or non intensive use I agree.
But if you want to use them from an SSD drive, for instance...

Damn, Andrew, is there an audio format you don't master? Hat off sir

 

there's more to consider,
any compression will require certain processing power to decompress, so although format such as FLAC being losless (so you compress-decompress from wav and back to wav, should remain exactly same bit-perfect), it still puts some stress on computing resources,
nowadays libraries, although being huge, are making use of actual samples fairly efficiently, usually loading the used ones entirely into RAM anyway (where things need to be decompressed anyway), so unless you're planning to load Gigabytes of samples into single instrument, then I see no problem just having regular HDD, something like 4TB WD Blue costs around 120€

 

All you say it's true. There's no argument about having your libs in HDD, at least for (permanent) storage.

Even so, using SSD for your most used libs is a good idea, since the almost zero SSD access time allows you to speed up libs a lot. Compressing in this case is about saving expensive SSD storage size.

Also, you can decrease a lot the preload buffer size, though if you also use HDD stored libs you have to find a balance. A side benefit is that you use two drives so it also helps to improve HDD stored libs speed as long as you use at once libs of both SSD and HDD drives.

 

Last edited: Aug 18, 2017

Going OT in this one, the best alternative would be an Hybrid SSD/HDD drive. Be it all hardware or mixing two drives with Intel storage chipsets or equivalent ones. After a short "warm up" all most used samples benefit from SSD speed.

Unfortunately my rig is too old to do this. I tried a third party software tool, primocache, and it works like a charm, but in serious use you can't trust its reliability. On the other side, you only need read cache with sample libs, so it can crash but you don't loose data.

 

nope, hybrid drive is overpriced bullsh!t,
since those are using 8GB SSD portion, it would be way "faster" to create a (dynamic) RAMdisk (which shouldn't be problem nowadays 16-32GB becoming more and more common) and just use it as caching/temporary drive (easily reaching 12GB/s read/write compared to 0.5GB/s read/write limit of SATAIII SSDs)

 

You're right, they are overprized and it's like a RAID0-risk: they can fail both, twice the risk. But a solid "SSD drive caching a HDD one" solution like Intel and others storage chips is very interesting.