Question: Compressing Files on Save??

[blue4u]

Every time I save a song in RiffWorks it says..."Compressing Files". Normally, compression means that information is being thrown out to make file sizes smaller. Does this mean that every time I save I'm essentially losing sound quality??

Why does RW need to compress files when it saves?

Thanks,
Rich

[gatorjj]

This is purely semi-educated speculation on my part, but I don't think it's compressing the files like an MP3 would for example. The song file is similar to a zip archive, in that all the individual wav files are captured into a single file.

From what I can tell there's no compression actually happening to the audio files themselves. If you look at the size of the song files that would seem to be the case anyway.

[atalwar]

The compression you are refering to is archival compression(lossless) that rw uses.

Unless you are reencoding the audio into another compressed audio format there won't be any quality loss.

Why does RW need to compress files when it saves?

Because these is no use of uncompressed raw data for you unless its being used by rw it's to much easier to manage singe file than having multiple files lying around for a project.

Consider an rw song as a big suitcase where you throw your all gear and stuff(audio and other riff data), close it down. and you are ready to go instead of carrying everything required individually

Here is RW way of working out things

At Open : Open the suitcase and neatly arrange and connect all your gear so you are ready to jam in no time.

at save : pack the suitcase into a single entity that is compressed to take less hard drive space.

From what I can tell there's no compression actually happening to the audio files themselves.

The data compression does happen on audio files as well, but to the limit they can be compressed using standard compression algorithm (pkzip in rw case) but as i said above it's lossless atleast for 16 bit audio.

Normally, compression means that information is being thrown out to make file sizes smaller

Actually its the other way around. Before the invention of lossy encoding where you could live with loss of data (such as mp3, mpeg,jpeg etc) , compression was a way of packing the data most efficiently so that at runtime it could be decompressed without losing single bit of data (lossless compression).

[blue4u]

My head is slowly starting to turn all the way around on my shoulders...

[scott]

My head is slowly starting to turn all the way around on my shoulders...

Stand clear of the projectile vomit!!

[gatorjj]

What Amit's saying is it's cool, you're not losing any quality. Go forth young man, and make quality uncompressed music!

[Charvelguy]

My head is slowly starting to turn all the way around on my shoulders...

LOL!

I'm glad you asked this Rich 'cause I was thinking the same dang thing for about a few months now and was heading here just for the purpose of posting a similar question..and here it is already laid out all for me complete with humor!
(must be the moon-or all the rain we're havin that has been keepin me indoors)

Now that the answer is: Cool! there is no loss to sound quality as I save a good deal as I go along in the process of writing.

My next observation and request would be, (and maybe its too impractical)
is it possible to set the RW program to save just one Riff layer as you go along instead of having to wait for larger works (100mb+) to compress new additions?

For the most part I have no issue with how it is now so this is just a sugggestion.
I have tunes which-when they start getting 15-20 riff/ song layers going on, so it takes a bit of time to compress. Just was wondering if it would be possible in the future to have an option so we could just right click and save by individual Riff layer. Then as you actually exit the RW program, it would recompress all the riff layers. It would shave some time off the wait to create process, even though it would be rather minor. On the whole, this would work better for me, not sure about how others may feel on that.

[atalwar]

My head is slowly starting to turn all the way around on my shoulders...

My apologies for sounding too technical, i seem to have developed a tendency to get carried away at times.

You can go ahead and not worry too much about audio quality.

Quality loss of some nature is always going to happen in analog to digital conversion (be it any device h/w or s/w,but that is non noticeable to human ears as long you are at 16 bit 44.1 khz samplerate (acceptable standard for cd quality audio) or higher) but i would rather not go into gory details of that.

[blue4u]

Does anyone here know if RiffWorks' audio engine is capturing 16, 24 or 32 bit? A friend of mine said he can hear a sound quality difference from recording in Reaper vs. recording in RiffWorks at (16 bit???).

Although I am using RW as a songwriting tool it would be nice to know that I could transfer a wav file of tracks at 24 bit. Is this possible? Perhaps my friend is not right about this and there is no audible difference between 16 bit and 24 bit? He does have a good ear though.

Are DAW's like Reaper, Live and Cubase recording higher quality files than RiffWorks? Thanks for all the help guys! I sooo much appreciate it...

Peace,
Rich