John wrote:the Rush folder is on it's way up, there are 23 albums in it, and as
usual, they are not zipped, so you can pick and choose!
Thank you John so much for NOT zipping these files! It is greatly appreciated.
ZIP is a very popular compression algorithm supported by many popular programs
such as WinZip, 7-Zip, and recent versions of Microsoft Windows. ZIPping a file
or set of files can often reduce their size significantly at the cost of
needing to be unzipped before they can be used.
Note though that I said, “…often reduce their size.”
Unfortunately, “often” doesn’t mean “always.”
Music files in formats like .mp3, .ogg, .aac, and picture, and movie files are
already compressed. The result is that compressing them again won't make much
difference and could even make them larger.
So there’s typically no space-saving advantage to ZIPping a photo, a movie, or
an MP3.
Of course, creating a .zip file is useful for more than just compression.
It can be handy to ZIP several files (for example, a collection of several
audio files) together, combining them into a single file for a single download,
attachment, or file transfer.
People still need to unZIP before they can see them, but it can be simpler to
transfer only one file rather than several.
Windows File Compression automatically compresses files so that they take up
less space. In the best circumstance Windows File Compression can free up a lot
of space – but frequently it’s not as much as you might expect, and there is
cost.
Please do not zip files together thinking you are saving space. Yes, it does
make it simpler -- for the uploader -- to transfer files, but makes it much
more difficult for the downloader to know what is being transferred. Remember
that most of us still have to pay for every nano-second of downloading time,
and a large zipped file is costly when we only want one piece of music. Be
considerate of all us poor people!
TG
