[linux-audio-user] MIDI on alsa with SBLIve

[davidrclark at earthlink.net]

Chris Cannam posted:

> Because sfArk and sfpack compress soundfonts much better than 
> zip/gzip/bzip2 can.

This is absolutely correct.  The reason is that text files repeat character
sequences exactly whenever words and other character combinations are
used over and over again.  The "normal" compression methods build tables
and utilize this precisely repetitive nature effectively.  Audio files 
repeat character sequences only approximately, so are not recognized as 
being almost the same even though they sound the same, hence are regarded 
as new sequences.  True binary files (e.g. stripped executables) look pretty
much random, also, to one of these compression algorithms.  The random
appearance of audio files is one reason why MP3, sfark, etc. were developed.

To distinguish between these latter techniques: As most people know by now,
MP3 is a lossy technique which means that information is lost never to be 
seen again.  sfark is not. These soundfont compression techniques are a
compromise between loss of information and effective compression.  Some 
out there may be using MP3's in place of such compression schemes as 
sfark's, believing that MP3's are as good or better due to the good 
compression ratios obtainable.  This is  at a fairly heavy cost.  I would
advise against it generally, which is the reason I'm spending time posting
this.  MP3 is fine for distribution over limited-resource channels, but
not so fine for soundfonts/samples.

Hope this helps someone out there.  Now I really am going to try to get
caught up....

Regards to everyone,
Dave.