In the past few weeks I've been working on defining a new standard called FlacPak for compressing MIDI instrument patch files. This format uses FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and zlib to compress audio and binary data respectively. By using FLAC for audio and exploiting other characteristics of instrument files (stereo samples, differing bit widths, etc) much better compression can be achieved then if just using a binary compressor. Currently SoundFont, Downloadable Sounds (DLS) and GigaSampler files are supported. Adding support for a particular instrument format means creating a specific file handler for that format. The decoder on the other hand is generic and sees the resulting file as interleaved binary and audio data. This means other instrument formats can be added in a backwards compatible manner. This also means that FlacPak isn't limited to just instrument patch formats, pretty much any binary/audio combined data format might benefit from FlacPak (provided the audio is mono/stereo 8/16/24 bit). The current reference FlacPak implementation is part of the libInstPatch library that is in active development. A CVS tarball of libInstPatch was made to help in getting feedback from users on the current design of FlacPak so that the format can be finalized. To read more about FlacPak: http://swami.sourceforge.net/flacpak.php To get right to the download (libinstpatch-cvs_20031201.tar.bz2): http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=47510 I welcome any feedback on this format and the results obtained. The Swami development list can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=47510 I still haven't tested it a whole lot so don't trust your data with it yet. There is also a lot more tuning that can be done to get the compression higher :) Cheers. Josh Green