Compressed Acid Loops?

It occurred to me the other night that with all the non-loss compression methods around, surely it is time that Cakewalk came up with their own compressed acid loop format. Most non-loss formats manage around 40-50% compression of wave files and it would seem to be a good idea if P5 were to support such a format in future, even more so if it could still embed groove data into these compressed files....

Just a thought (and an opportunity for the 'but HD are so cheap these days' crew to make an appearance! )

ORIGINAL: xylyx
Just a thought (and an opportunity for the 'but HD are so cheap these days' crew to make an appearance! )

That's my que!

Yeah, hard drives are cheap...but more importantly it seems to me that decompressing a loop on the fly would be a performance degradation within an application that already challenges the fastest machines.

ORIGINAL: Digital Aura

Nice...

And is this ogg-vorbis format lossy? Or is it a viable means of doing this Xylyx?? Cuz it seems like the way to go! Open source and accessible by many media players!

Ogg Vorbis is a lossy format, much like MP3 and WMA. I was thinking more of APE, FLAC or PCA, which was developed by Sonic Foundry...dunno whether Sony still uses/supports this format in their current releases or whether it kept the acid loop info. FLAC seems to be the one that is garnering the most attention and Autechre have released their albums on Bleep using this format.

ORIGINAL: techead

Yeah, hard drives are cheap...but more importantly it seems to me that decompressing a loop on the fly would be a performance degradation within an application that already challenges the fastest machines.

I don't see this as much of an issue, as any overhead would be minimal. Look at when people first started asking for mp3 support in audio software and a common response was that the decoding added too much overhead, which didn't turn out to be the case. Besides, if you end up bouncing softsynth tracks to audio loops (which is why I brought this subject up in the first place) then decompressing an audio file on the fly is gonna use a lot less cpu than playing the softsynth itself.

Look at Reason's refills and how compressed they are, but it doesn't affect the performance of that app...I assume Reason decompresses the waves into RAM and plays from RAM, which would work for P5 too. In the end, my main issue is that I don't want to keep buying HD's (especially when my music computer is a laptop) just to be able to add more samples to my collection, when I could effectively store 100Gb of samples on a 60Gb HD with current technology that is available for free...