VOCPACK is a compressor/decompressor for 8-bit digital sound using a
lossless algorithm; it is useful to save disk space without degrading sound
quality.
It can compress signed and unsigned data, sampled at any rate, mono or
stereo. Since the method used is not lossy, it isn't necessary to strip file headers before compressing.
VOCPACK was developed for use with .VOC (SoundBlaster) and .WAV (Windows)
files, but any 8-bit sound can be compressed since the program takes no assumptions about the file structure. If you are working with signed data
(like files imported from Amiga) you should use the switch -s on the command line to make VOCPACK work better; the default is to compress
unsigned data (SoundBlaster standard).
.MOD and .ST files are not compressed very well, since they contain a lot
of sequencing information and the sound is sampled at a low frequency; in this case the files created by VOCPACK could be slightly bigger than the
ones produced by general-purpose compression programs.
The typical compression ratio obtained goes from 0,8 for files sampled at
11 KHz to 0,4 for 44 Khz files. The best results are obtained with 44 KHz sounds
(mono or stereo): general-purpose archivers create files that can be twice longer than the output of VOCPACK. You can obtain smaller values
using lossy compressors but if your goal is to keep the sound quality unaltered you should use a lossless program like
VOCPACK.