This tries to answer some Frequently Asked Questions:
How does it come that when I unpack a SFPack archive, the resulting SF2 file may be slightly smaller or larger compared to the original SF2 file? |
SFPack is not a "give me all the bytes" compression program. Instead it analyzes the SF2 file and packs all the information in the it, but during this process also removes all the unneeded SF2 overhead. When you unpack a SFPack archive, the original SF2 file format is reconstructed. Now, emu's SF2 "bible" is quite clear how a SF2 file should look like. But most SF2 editor/writes are not following all the specifications to the last point. SFPack does. For example after each sample block in a SF2 file there should be exactly 46 padding bytes before the next sample block starts. Now some editors do not write any padding bytes, some editors write 256. SFPack writes 46. This is the reason why there can be slight size differences compared to the original SF2 file. |