rar vs others...

[isus]

do you encode a lot in rar? or do you use broader stuff like zip?

(ps if you know of a good rar 'decompressor', lemme know. winrar sucks, and so do most of these others im finding.)

[origin]

I like winrar better than most other compression utilities. It was proven in several tests that rar's have a better compression ratio than the competion, the only thing is that it is a bit slower than others. Winzip is probably one of the worst compression utilies to use it is good just for simple small file compression but once we get to talking about larger file size winrar ownz it. you might want to check out another compression utility to see if it fits ur satisfaction:

Winace(.ace file extension fairly good.)

P.S:Keep in mind that most or all of the compressing programs decompress all of the other formats so winzip also can uncompress rar files or ace files and vice versa. So maybe a little trial and error is necessary but when u want fast decompression I would think that winace would do the best job.

l8

[Rickio]

check out 7-zip http://www.7-zip.org/

[DainBramaged]

WinRAR is the way to go. As origin said, it has been proven that it compresses much better than the competition, save for a very small minority of files in which .zip actually compresses a fraction better.

At this point, speed is irrelevant in my opinion. The minute you might save with one program over the other really isn't worth switching away from WinRAR.

[shawners]

I downloaded video games, and it had a 1.5 billion file size compressed into 700 megs or something. IT was an awesome compression program =)

[DeweyBear]

rar of course, using zip can cause you to become the black sheep of the usenet family

[Undying Wizard NHD]

PKzip all the way

[ferrarimodena360]

1 of the biggets reason for using rar is that u are able to extract songs out of an archive even if for some reason u have a failed (icomplete) download

like archive is of 50mb of 10songs 5 mb each and u have downloaded 33mb then u will be able to get 6songs ,

[phalkon30]

I love winrar, since I started using it I haven't gone back to my previous favorite "winzip"

[cpugeniusmv]

winrar is definately my favorite.

there has been some movement in the 7zip project...i haven't had an opportunity to do any extensive testing with it yet though :)

[Rickio]

Not to change the subject, but foobar can play archived music files, zip,rar and 7zip. It is just a little indication that 7zip is gaining some larger acceptance.
It's handy to use foobar and I actually was able to retrieve a corrupted music file with it. Got a crc error and it would not extract. Put it in foobar and it played the song and whatever bits were missing were not even noticeable, so I extracted it with foobar.

[DainBramaged]

7zip is gaining larger acceptance...

...or the makers of foobar are being very complete. Two different things, at least in my book.

[Rickio]

7zip is gaining larger acceptance...

...or the makers of foobar are being very complete. Two different things, at least in my book.

uh okie dokie

[Kevin06906]

Zip,

I don't know what you guys are talking about, so i chose .zip files because i open them more often.

[LordNIkon]

do you encode a lot in rar? or do you use broader stuff like zip?

(ps if you know of a good rar 'decompressor', lemme know. winrar sucks, and so do most of these others im finding.)

How can WinRAR Suck?? It is the best Compression software out there by far. All the zips I download(after Virus Scanning) I quickly convert to Self extracting RAR files.

7zip is an excellent program as well. I like its support for
*.bz2" files.