Manjaro compression archive for 50GB audio directory

[cencar]

Hi everyone,

I have a number of audio directories that I need to archive. The level of compression, to me, is not important but speed is, the directories are 50GB or larger.
I've used .tar.gz and .tar, .tar was slightly faster, here are a list of Manjaro's default options for compression:-

.7z .ar .cbz .ear .epub .exe .jar .odp .ods

.odt .otp .ots .ott .tar .tar.7z .tar.br

.tar.bz2 .tar.gz .tar.lzma .tar.xz .war .zip

Any advise appreciated.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

If the audio files are FLAC they cannot be compressed any further if you also dig the maximum sound quality.

Otherwise it depends on what you want to do with the audio. Convert to MP3 if you have a cheap Chinese portable speaker, because OGG format is not recognized. The last time I had a portable thing that could play OGG was Sandisk that I bought over 10 years ago, and it sucked because it lasted only six months. The battery charge wasn't very good. It was small enough to put into a pant pocket but had a ridiculous screen which wasn't for watching videos.

WAV compresses very well into ZIP or similar format but my recommendation is to redo them as FLAC. No sound quality would be lost out of it and the ration won't be worse than 67% of the original WAV file. If you want 10-to-1 ratio then choose compression to OGG Vorbis at 128 or 160mbps (VBR not CBR because it's very slow), or MP3 at 192 or maybe 256kbps. MP3 is an inferior format for the same bitrate against OGG Vorbis, but the latter is heck to support by programmers. Note that MP3 or OGG will cause a loss of some sound quality, but with popular music or speech it wouldn't matter a lot.

Compressing any binary file to TAR is only lopping off the extra memory wasted by the disk sector size while the original file resided on that disk. These days we have 2kB sector sizes on pluggable USB disks, and 32kB or higher on internal SSD to support higher capacities and/or speeds. It might not matter a lot with an audio file which is megabytes long. But it might matter if you have hundreds of those audio files which could mean the difference between needing it to fit into 40GB and into 40GiB.

Do not only take my word with the various audio formats. Look them up in the online search.

 

[cencar]

Hi wendy-lebaron,
Firstly, thank you for your very comprehensive response. And I will take your word for it, obviously you know what you're talking about.
Most of the files either .MP 3~4 or .FLAC and the level of compression is unimportant. I want to move them to 2 TB external Storage HDD and I have plenty of space.
Moving such large directories, I found it's better to archive them first. I do not want to change the formats, just store what, I've got. So now you have the full picture, what would you suggest, from the default options in my original post?