The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

From: "Scott Gibbons" <nomusic@...>

> Cool, that's what I was hoping to hear from someone. I don't download many
> patches, but having recently scored a DX7 (there are approximately 30,000
> patches on the internet for this thing!!) I downloaded a bunch of those -
> most of which were zipped - and had problems with a few. But only the
> zipped ones. Being such an ancient instrument (1983 - was Windows even
> around at that time?) some of these may have been zipped with an early

data

> compression tool somewhere down the line and that may have been what
> introduced some glitches and errors.

I sincerely doubt that. Windows came around about 1985, but that was Windows
1.0. The first usable Windows, 3.0, was from the early nineties.

Before people were using PKZIP (the DOS version of WinZip, so to say), they
were using PKARC. But there were problems concerning patents over
algorithms, so Phil Katz (hence the 'PK' in front of PKARC and PKZIP, and
the two first characters of a zip file being 'PK') developed PKZIP.

WinZip will recognise most compression algorithms, but for some of them,
like LhArc (the standard compression format on the Amiga), you need an
external program.

> Are compressed AN1/MIDI/sysex files really much smaller? Had anyone A-B'd
> the difference? No biggie, just curious...

If I look at the 'Elson99' sound bank, the uncompressed AN1 file is 226.230
bytes, whereas compressed it's 5.270 byes. So yes, it makes a huge
difference. Even with fully packed sound banks, you get compression ratios
of 80% to 90%. This simply means that, by using Zip files instead of AN1
files, you can store five to ten times as more sounds.

- Peter

Zip should be applied to EVERYTHING that goes up there.
Example of A/B comparison: from
http://www.jdlx-musique.com/support/an1x/downloads.htm, the file Pavage8 has
a compression ration of 92%! Before - 221kb, after 17.7kb.

Regarding obsolete Zip formats: Try http://www.simtel.net and search for
older versions.
The present version of Zip has been out for over 5 years, Phil Katz probably
isn't gonna mess with the algorithm soon (Phil Katz, inventor of PKZIP, is a
millionaire now due to his shareware program pkzip released in the late
80s.)

The only files that shouldn't be zipped are formats that are compression
formats to start with such as .jpg, .jif and .pdf. Otherwize, there are
redundancies in most files that Zip can compress.