A nice collection of pointers and links to audio/music compression software.

http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org/

This is a set of tools that are used to analyze MPEG streams, and are intended to help developers check out the compliance of their work. There are three different tools that help you poke around in MPEG streams, see their contents, and dump their headers. Linux.

Version 0.7a is shipping in July, 2003.

http://ardmore.net/~thepaces/vk_tools/vk_tools_index.html

A Php application to manage compressed archives. Handles Zip, tar, and proprietary archives.

http://phpzip.sourceforge.net/

Convert back and forth between PNG and BMP. Freeware.

http://pmt.sourceforge.net/bmp2png/index.html

OTR stands for “Old Time Radio”. The owners of this project want to be able to listen to classic mono AM radio recordings on their Sharp PDAs.

http://otrplayer.sourceforge.net/

Pngmeta is a tool for extracting metadata from PNG files. This is freeware.

http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngmeta/index.html

The Helix DNA Producer is a project that Real Networks has dropped into the open source space. Producer is a platform for creating streaming content and downloadable media files.

https://helix-producer.helixcommunity.org/

This article is an addition to an earlier CodeProject posting that was designed to make your life easier when working with Zip files. The previous article had support for extraction and navigation of Zip files. This article adds support for creation of Zip files.

http://codeproject.com/cpp/ZipUnzip.asp

GRZip - is a high-performance file compressor based on Burrows-Wheeler Transform and Advanced Weighted Frequency Counting. It uses The Block-Sorting Lossless Data Compression Algorithm, which has received considerable attention over recent years for both its simplicity and effectiveness. This implementation has compression rate of 2.364 bps on the Calgary Corpus. The site has Windows, Linux, and Dos executables along with source.

http://magics.h10.ru/main.php?page=GRZip&folder=projects

by Jürgen Abel and William Teahan. This paper looks at a few different techniques for preprocessing data before performing text compression, and compares the gains achieved when combining the preprocessors with PPM, BWT, and LZ algorithms.

http://www.data-compression.info/JuergenAbel/Preprints/Preprint_Text_Preprocessing.pdf

Hash Zip attempts to store 256 byte blocks by hashing them down to 30 byte blocks. Decompression seems problematic.

http://freedaemonconsulting.com/tech/hzip.php

UHBC is a blocksorting compressor optimized for high compression ratios. The program uses recent research results by S. Deorowicz and J. Abel for improved second stage processing after the BWT. Some extensions and sophisticated modeling provide top compression ratios, giving the best known result for Calgary Corpus (2.208 bps average). UHBC is free for non-commercial use. No source available.

Reader Grebnov I. had this to say: Compression is very good, but too slow + no source code..

ftp://ftp.elf.stuba.sk/pub/pc/pack/uhbc10.zip

Stated objective: To further the adoption of the MPEG-4 Standard, by establishing MPEG-4 as an accepted and widely used standard among application developers, service providers, content creators and end users..

Update: This group has now changed it’s name to The MPEG Industry Forum, and have expanded their charter to include all emerging MPEG standards. For right now that includes MPEG-7 and MPEG-21, but we’re not ruling out anything in the future.

http://www.m4if.org/

This product performs a huge number of conversions among different media types. Want to convert your huge collection of MP3 files to WMA? No problem. MPEG-2 to AVI? No problem. MediaConvert even handles some unusal conversions, such as video to animated GIF. And naturally, a huge number of conversions between various image formats, including GIF, JPG, PNG, and a host of additional types.

Release 2.3 shipped in Julyy, 2003.

http://mediaconvert.mystikmedia.com/

An article that gets into the details you need to know about in order to use the MMX instruction set found on Intel processors. The author uses image processing as a demo app.

http://codeproject.com/cpp/mmxintro.asp

With this plugin your copy of Winamp will display track information on an LCD display attached to your PC. Just the thing if you’re looking to set up a jukebox of some kind, maybe in your car. Windows, free.

http://www.markuszehnder.ch/projects/lcdplugin/

Just what the name says, a very simple Zip program for Win32. Registration is $10.

http://www.atomicrobot.com/shareware.htm

Hawk Software is now selling a pair of codecs, LPC-10 and OpenLPC, that are suitable for Windows CE, CELinux, and other 32-bit embedded platforms. More are planned for future releases.

http://www.hawksoft.com/hawkvoice/commcodecs.shtml

The Video Compression Manager is an add-on from Microsoft that will allow older apps that use AVI containers to use WMA 9 codecs.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c99c648-5800-4aa3-a2fe-3de948689
db8&DisplayLang=en

This tool is touted as being able to repair corrupt CAB files. It scans the file and recovers as much data as possible.

Version 1.1 is shipping as of November, 2003.

Reader Antonio P. says: Relatively useful but very expensive for infrequent use.

http://www.cab-repair.com/

This nice post on the CodeGuru web site does Gzip compression to and from memory, instead of to and from files.

http://codeguru.com/algorithms/GzipHelper.html

Advertises itself as the “The Best Free Zip Utility on the Net!” Free registration is optional, enables search utility which provides some payback.

http://www.braxio.com/zip.htm

JPEG 2000 Part 6 refers to the standard for compound documents.

http://www.jpeg.org/public/fcd15444-6.pdf

This product analyzes and adjusts MP3 files so that they all have the same volume. It appears to be free.

As of Septembery, 2003, Version 1.4.3 is shipping.

http://www.geocities.com/mp3gain/

A Win32 Zip compression utility. Looks very generic, and appears to be free.

http://www.geocities.com/sixpackvitasoy/hahazip.htm

Billed as a front end for the Lame encoder, LameFE actually supports much more than that on the Win32 platform. Rip CDs, encode using Lame, Monkey’s Audio, or Ogg Vorbis, or playback using a similar batch of codecs.

http://lamefe.sourceforge.net/

A media player that comes in a free and pay version. Although it’s labeled as a media player, it looks to me as though this is primarily inteded to be used as a DVD player.

http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/

It’s a little hard for me to tell what Epigon is selling. They have a nice picture of some kind of board on their front page, but I don’t think they have any hardware for sale. They do appear to have audio codecs for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4, as well as what appears to be a proprietary speech codec called eSpeech.

Note: Reader Ragu says that despite the problem siwith the web page, he is a big fan of their products. He is a satisfied customer who feels their audio codecs are the best.

http://www.epigonaudio.com/

Ken Silverman’s Zip utility. Ken says:

My own version of PKZIP. It’s quite a bit slower, and it’s a bit of a memory hog… but for good reason. KZIP creates smaller .ZIP files than PKZIP with maximum compression enabled! No, I didn’t cheat. You see… during compression, PKZIP gives up after it has found so many matches - this is why it is so fast, and also why KZIP can beat it. .ZIP files created with KZIP are compatible with all of the latest .ZIP software - just that if you use KZIP, your file will be a few percent smaller. Decompression is still very fast, making KZIP the perfect tool for shaving off seconds from download times.

Note: Reader Nicolas gives this product a 5-star rating, and recommends you use it with Ken’s other produt, ZIPMIX.

http://www.advsys.net/ken/utils.htm#kzip

Another Ken Silverman utility. Ken has this to say about ZipMix:

Sometimes, when you run 2 different .ZIP programs on the same data (PKZIP & KZIP for example), some files get compressed better in one program, while other files get compressed better in the other. ZIPMIX will take the best files from each one and create a new output file, which is guaranteed to be equal to or smaller in size to both of the input files.

http://www.advsys.net/ken/utils.htm#zipmix