Ableton Forum

I noticed recently that Ableton Live seems to have undocumented WavPack (.wv files) support (unless it came for me through some codec pack). Can anybody else confirm this as no documentation mentions WavPack?

So what is great about WavPack? It is pretty much similar to FLAC but with one important difference: WavPack supports 32-bit floating point (fp) audio. If you record or export 32-bit fb and convert it to FLAC the conversion is not lossless. FLAC did though recently gain support for 32-bit INTEGER audio but Ableton does not seem to (yet) support that and I don't see that much use case for it.

But with WavPack you can reduce size of your Ableton projects significantly without any loss of information. The more audio you use and especially the more you have recorded WAVs with silence the highers are potential gains. In my initial tests with a sample project you can shrink size of audio files to 37% of their original size. My project shrunk to about 60% of its original size. If you have a lot of recordings with absolute silence (such as when recording plugins) the gains could maybe be much higher.

Or course if audio files are wavpacks (or any other compressed audio) Ableton will consume more CPU/resources when playing the project. So if you have heavy project and lack of resources it would not make sense to edit a project with compressed audio.

BUT when you send Ableton project to a collab partner, master engineer or want to archive seldomly opened projects WavPack compression makes more sense. What would be best way to implement this?

- File menu - Compress project
- File menu - Uncompress project

When you compress a project Ableton would convert all WAV/AIFF files to lossless compression (WavPack for 32-bit FL audio and either WavPack or FLAC for rest of files)

When you uncompress a project Ableton would convert all WavPack/FLAC files back to uncompressed audio.


Opinions?

Live can indeed load WavPack files. They are converted to WAV files. So, at this point, using them will incur an additional cost in terms of disk space.
I fail to understand why projects must be smaller. All raw audio files are already stored on disk. Compressing them would only result in adding extra files, unless you decide to delete them or start with WV files from the start.

Performance is an issue. Loading a two-minute WV file takes significantly longer than loading a WAV file, due to the decompression process.

Compatibility could pose a challenge. Are the other programs, plugins, and similar tools you use compatible with this format?

To send projects, compress them into a zip file, which you likely do already, to keep everything together.
The same applies to archiving, although disk space is very cheap nowadays.

Live supports 32-bit integer WAV files, but cannot open 32-bit integer WavPack files.