Marco is referring to a lossless compression format called FLAC

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

It’s probably the best overall choice technically because it’s free (as in beer and otherwise) everywhere and there are usable (if geeky) user interfaces for all major platforms (as opposed to RAR which is a commercial product and command line only on everything but Windows)

The big problem with FLAC is that you lose ACID information (one of the big reasons to stay in WAV) when you compress. They skip all the RIFF tags they don’t recognize (a design decision which personally I don’t understand because they could just as easily do a ‘pass through’ of those).

Ideally, the best way to upload samples would be save them out of your tool of choice as uncompressed WAVs, then use FLAC to compress them, then ZIP up the FLACs. Then when folks un-ZIP and de-FLAC they have a 100% lossless audio representation of your sources.

Peace,
Victor

Thanks for the tips guys. As you know, this was my first upload of compressed files and I don’t do very much compressing of files, so this is pretty unfamiliar to me. Basically, I should just bypass the whole compressing to RAR format and just choose the ‘send to compressed ZIP folder’( i have winxp on my system) to ZIP format instead? If I need a better understandng of it all, then I’m all ears. Whatever’s best for the users on the site I will do.

Quote: Basically, I should just bypass the whole compressing to RAR format and just choose the ‘send to compressed ZIP folder’( i have winxp on my system) to ZIP format instead?

Yes. ;)

Victor