It just occured to me that it ought to be possible to transparently compress/decompress the playlists - e.g. with 7-zip, i think you're already using? - without too much difficulty. of course, if you don't want to do this for performance reasons, i understand.. but let me explain the reason for asking:

I have a network of multi-user machines, everyone uses foobar. there is a 30MB profile space limit; avoids copying too much data at logon/logoff. curently foobar's playlists in my application data folder are amoung the largest files in my area - my USA list for example is nearly 1MB. There must be other people with similaraly large playlists. Naturally being plain text they compress quite well - quick test with rar took it down to about 100k. this would add up to a significant saving in profile size, which brings benefits to logon/off times, and helps keep people under the limit!

any consideration/comments appreciated. this is only an idea i had 5 minutes ago that AFAIK hasn't been suggested before, i did a quick search and couldn't find any reference.

edit: i hope this isn't against the rules to make a "request" - i find no mention of this in the rules - it's not a demand, only a suggestion that may or may not be a good idea Also doesn't seem to fit any of the forums exactly so i went for general, hope this is ok too..

For now (before this feature is implemented, if it is) if you are on Windows 2000 or XP you can tell Windows to compress the playlists directory - it gets mine down to 692 KB from 1.98 MB.

you can, but weirdly Windows doesn't count that compression towards the profile size - the uncompressed size gets counted. so it helps but doesn't help, if you see what i mean. if the application handled compression, of course it would get counted. but good idea, i only thought of that a few days ago aswell

edit: also 692 from 1.98 doesn't sound that good - maybe ntfs compression isn't very good for this sort of data, although of course if foobar was to implement this you'd want to go with something fast and not worry too much about comp. ratio.

i second the idea.

compression of database could follow (if it doesn't use any indexes and is being read sequentially)

The database is memory resident from startup until shutdown.

Heh.. I've been wondering about compressed playlists myself, too. Would it be feasible to use zlib's gzip compression on the playlists on write? Decompression on read?

Would it be feasible to use zlib compression on the in-memory database?

What about bzip2?

Wow. Lots of questions from someone clueless. I hope those aren't all stupid questions.

Maybe you should buy RAM Doubler. ^_________^

Well, you 'could' run them out of compressed files in theory, this would cause slowdowns and increased processor time for people who make playlist changes often.

I like the idea of compressed playlists. It would definitely be useful.

Call me a massochist, but my playlists directory is 21mb.

So those were stupid questions, eh? I wasn't very keen on memory compression, not at all, actually, so fair enough.


On the other hand, I'm very interested in compressed playlists. If the files in the playlist directory are only read or written at start/shutdown, then slowdown won't be as serious as when changes are written back every time something changes.

heya, i was about to request playlist compression and found i already did a few years ago!

well, since upgrading to 0.9x, ive noticed the playlists are a lot bigger for a given number of songs (is this right?). so now playlist compression (or lack of) is much more of an issue than it was. please, if someone would consider a cheesy zlib hack that'd be great - getting hard to use foobar with roaming profiles which is a shame because 0.9x is so good otherwise.