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In praise of the .alp format

Posted: Sat May 18, 2019 11:00 pm
by Pitch Black
Just sayin’... I just made up a stems package of a track for remixing: 24 tracks of stereo 24bit stems for 6mins. The resulting project was 2.3GB, when packed as an .alp it came down to 330MB!!

Live must do some very clever ignoring of silent sections, followed by its lossless compression.

Impressive! 8)

Re: In praise of the .alp format

Posted: Sun May 19, 2019 12:53 am
by pottering
Thanks for the info, it will come handy when weighing what to do when archiving old projects.

Re: In praise of the .alp format

Posted: Sun May 19, 2019 1:56 am
by Pitch Black
:D I think the amount of space saving is quite material-dependent, I’ve had compressed sizes well under half the original size before, but this is a new “personal best”. This was a “song of two halves” with half the tracks having no content in the the first half and the others no content in the 2nd. All those long silences seem to have no penalty at all on the compressed file. I’d never seen such a great saving before.

Re: In praise of the .alp format

Posted: Sun May 19, 2019 3:37 am
by fishmonkey
long silences should compress really well. high redundancy. coming up next... millions of zeroes!

Re: In praise of the .alp format

Posted: Sun May 19, 2019 5:11 am
by Pitch Black
Image

Re: In praise of the .alp format

Posted: Sun May 19, 2019 5:13 pm
by mihai
Wow, that's a huge difference. I'm sure it wouldn't compress as well but 7zip is a nice alternative.

Re: In praise of the .alp format

Posted: Mon May 20, 2019 2:38 pm
by ark
An alp file is really an xml file run through gzip.

Re: In praise of the .alp format

Posted: Mon May 20, 2019 3:44 pm
by chrk
ark wrote:
Mon May 20, 2019 2:38 pm
An alp file is really an xml file run through gzip.
The .als (Live Set) is the xml file. The .alp packs the whole project folder structure, including collected samples. THOSE are the storage hogs.