I know it’s a little snobby but it’s a little surprising when I run into musicians who don’t know about RAR.

It gets phenomenal compression rates on WAV and other uncompressed sound files. I often get to 60% of original size without any loss of data. (Compared with 95% with Zip.)

Of course if you’re a cracker/warez user you know it well for programs and other government secrets.

But the audio compression, specifically, is pretty magnificent. In later versions I have found setting it to ‘Auto‘ is just fine.

If you’re going to exchange loops/samples in their original WAV/uncompressed formats (which is the only way I know to preserve ACIDized loop information), then I recommend teaching your virtual partners about RAR.

ACID Pro has a LZW/Zip implementation built in to create a ‘bundle’ for your project, but the compression is useless for actually getting things smaller. Here are steps I do to scrunch down a project:

Do “Save as” acd-zip file type.

Do “Save as” again, only this time to a clean directory and a regular acd project. Make sure to have ‘copy media’ checked.

RAR up the new directory.

You will love the results.

I do similar steps to archive my FL Studio projects, which tend to drag along SoundFonts when bundling. (Remember that the meat of an SF2 file, are all the uncompressed wav samples so RAR works just as well on them.)

The only issue I’ve ever had is the handling of tar.gz files from my hoster. I found that I still need WinZIP to handle those.