Import sample (*.ogg, *.mp3)

[psishock]

Perhaps its just best to buy a new harddisk. They're very cheap nowadays."

*cough* Lets try not to miss the point here =)
We could also rent an orchestra for a few hours, to to record our samples in the possible best quality for us, but we're talking about program features/optimizations here.

[Saga Musix]

well, as said, the first step to lossless compression would be compressed .it files. modplug can load them, but it saves them uncompressed.

[locctr]

Questioner reply :

If enable import *.ogg, *.mp3...
It's so convenient MIXING from another music.

[Sam_Zen]

but it saves them uncompressed

Maybe this is the crucial stage : saving the file. With lossless compression.
The ability to open a compressed file always can be solved by a converter first.

It's so convenient mixing from another music.

It's not the main purpose of MPT to function as a mixer. It's a tool to compose something.

[Relabsoluness]

well, as said, the first step to lossless compression would be compressed .it files. modplug can load them, but it saves them uncompressed.

I wonder how good a job it-compression does with sampledata for example compared to flac; any idea?

[Saga Musix]

afaik it's some kind of ZIP compression, so it's not as good as flac.

[Saga Musix]

http://www.users.on.net/~jtlim/ImpulseTracker/update.txt[/url]"]  - IT215 file format saving. Note that this is an alternative compression
      format and is often better, but not always. Public releases of IT214
      Patch 1 and Patch 2 can read IT215 compressed files. There is also a
      version of MikIT that can read IT215 compression.

The modplug code should have a decompression routine. i don't know how complicated it would be to add compression.

[psishock]

We could snach it from the Impulse Tracker code, it's already done there. ^_^

[Saga Musix]

IT is still closed source.

[psishock]

implement any open source method? FLAC would be perfect for the job imo, the other informations (beside the samples) from the module could be also zipped.

[Sam_Zen]

So, in the meantime, I like to point to an efficient bidirectional converter of WAV - FLAC : Flacdrop

[psishock]

Also, this feature could be linked with one of Skaven's topic, the "Revised IT Project (.ITP) functionality":
http://forum.openmpt.org/index.php?topic=2515.0
All the informations can remain in the module data, but samples could be referred to via relative paths (and be in FLAC format =), so the orientation and the work would be even more simpler. This way, the sample data could be (de)compressed separately and the other module data will stay zipped example. If a lot of songs are using the same samples over and over, this also can be a huge space saver.

(my own song folder takes about 6.3gig space, got about 900+ songs that are "uncompressed" and many of them are sharing the same sample data, in fact many of them are just variations of the same "theory", i just like to have them separated so i can more easily manage and search amongst them. Backuping example would be a lot lesser bother, if the whole folder would take much lesser space =)

[bvanoudtshoorn]

I think that it's important to bear a couple of things in mind when dealing with compressed samples.

1. If you don't decompress them, OpenMPT might start to chug when there are lots playing simultaneously - a lot of on-the-fly decoding isn't that easy.
2. If you do decompress them, it's going to do two things:
  a. Increase the load times for files *dramatically*;
  b. Increase the memory footprint for each file, particularly at load time.

To my mind, the second of these two options is the preferred, but really, I have to agree with LPChip about getting a bigger hard-drive. It sounds facetious, I know, but the fact of the matter is that one of the benefits of using OpenMPT is its speed and its small memory footprint. Compressing the samples will compromise one or both of these benefits.

Of course, I use Kontakt for all my sample playback, so each track I write is only about 250KB in size. I should point out that Kontakt doesn't compress its samples at all...

[psishock]

Barry, using the compressed samples while working on the music is out of option imo. I don't mind if the loading speed would increase, like the memory usage also. Thats a normal, in fact i would very much prefer all my samples to be uncompressed and stored in memory after load, while i'm working, for the best speed.

Bare in mind that all these compressions would be a -choice- for people who will have benefits from it, and don't mind the "negative" sides of the process, not forced to every user of course.

I have 2gigs of memory and around 800gigs hdd space, fairly fast processor, so the space requirements does not bother me much also, but if i'm talking about backing up, song/sample management, it would be more better if they would use a lot lesser space. I'm not using any VST sampler, but the OMPT's own. If that would be the case, maybe i would see the situation differently.

[Saga Musix]

implement any open source method?

Because I at least want modules that can be played with any other mod player as well? I know that you don't use samples and therefore don't care how you modules sound in XMplay or IT, but i do.