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Comment by randyrand | Hacker News Reader

Why not use FLAC? It gets 50-70% compression and is lossless.

Offhand I actually don't know of too many DAW programs that can record the individual tracks in FLAC format. Reaper does. Checking the Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hardware_and_software_...), it looks like Cakewalk Sonar does as well. But that leaves a lot of major players (Protools, Logic, Cubase, Ableton Live, FL Studio, etc.) that cannot.

It's not something I personally would do because (as others imply) IMHO the CPU trade-off is not worth it. Usually I use a blend of plug-ins (which take up no space) and recorded hardware, consequently the amount per track ends up being more like 100-600MB and not gigabytes. This is rather manageable.

However, I will note that sample based software synthesizers and sample packs can be huge these days, even despite in many cases lossless compressing being applied to the sample library. Omnisphere 2 for instance comes with a 60GB+ sample library (and that's before you add the add-ons like Moog Tribute). At the current extreme end, orchestral sample company Spitfire offers a string library (https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/hans-zimmer-strings/) that is 183GB in size and a sampled piano that's a whopping 211GB compressed (https://www.spitfireaudio.com/shop/a-z/hans-zimmer-piano/).

And that's why when I use Omnisphere (which I love, BTW), I send my projects to my best friend's computer; there's no way in hell I could fit that on my computer's internal SSD.

Even the relatively small software instruments (I've been really into Soniccoture's Glass/Works, for instance) use up like 8 GB apiece.

Audio mixing and mastering, particular with a lot of channels and hosted effects can be very CPU intensive task. As a general rule you wouldn't want to add compression/decompression to that process as well.

Granted, the industry standard in this area (ProTools) is an absolute CPU hog to begin with, so it needs all the help it can get.

DAWs usually encode as WAVs for when you're working on stuff because it's faster. But it would be nice for them to losslessly compress your files down to FLAC when you're done and shut down the program!

It would be interesting to have a media-friendly archive file format for the final tracks of completed projects that automatically compresses/decompresses WAVs as FLAC...and other raw data formats as their losslesss counterparts...closest thing I can find is zipx with wavpack.

> it would be nice for them to losslessly compress your files down to FLAC when you're done and shut down the program!

Renoise does that. With software synths and sample-based instruments, the biggest chunk for me is always the vocals.. and I would have to have a lot of takes to get over 100mb. Of course, my music isn't the music people who record a bunch of live instruments make, it's not a fair comparison, but still, for my uses it's fine, and it's super fast. I wish there was an option to bake VST into songs, I would love to be able to share full songs as "source" (obviously it would have to be songs only made with freeware VST, but art is all about limitations etc. blah blah :)

You can attach zip files containing anything you want on Bandcamp. I put a few Serum presets in one EP.

When you have enough channels and plugins running in real time, you'd rather optimize for CPU rather than disk space.

Surely OP isn't working on all projects all the time, and could "archive" some in FLAC form?

My guess is that in terms of a time vs. money trade off, buying a new drive and shelving the old one is the preferred method of archiving. The maintenance required to convert all files to some compact format might be enough of a PITA (however minor), that it's simply more worth it to buy a new drive.

Would be good if the tools had an archive option that automatically saves all the files as flac and can decompress to wav again with a single button press.

Reaper's Save As dialog will let you collect all samples and convert them with the project file. I wish all DAWs had that.

Basically what everyone else said. DAWs all prefer uncompressed WAV or AIFF, and it takes quite a bit of time to convert back and forth to FLAC. Plus, even if I did that I'd still have to use external HDDs, just cheaper ones.

WAV is the standard, period. That won't change for the foreseeable future.

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