Support playing audio within archive files

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From oracle2b on July 14, 2010 04:54:38

If could be able to play flac or mp3 contained within .rar or zip files that'd be extremely convenient for me. I have this functionality in foobar2000 but I'm running linux distro's more & more these days.

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/clementine-player/issues/detail?id=502

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From davidsansome on July 13, 2010 23:36:55

Actually playing files inside .zips would be fairly easy - there's already code in Clementine to decompress .zip and .gz files to load the Magnatune database.

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From oracle2b on July 14, 2010 15:51:45

In that case, i can't wait for this feature to appear in a future release. thanks

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From john.maguire on July 20, 2010 02:54:57

Labels: -Type-Defect Type-Enhancement Component-MusicLibrary

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From oracle2b on September 28, 2010 18:35:22

The latest release is great, but is there a timetable for implementing this feature?

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From oracle2b on December 11, 2010 22:03:24

This music player could be the first app that plays compressed archives on Linux. I though this feature would have had more proponents besides myself.

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From Velaru on February 28, 2011 02:47:18

Oddly enough it wouldnt be the first, several other players already do, including Amarok 1.x

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From harloczek on May 20, 2011 00:01:58

I'm waiting for this feature too

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From hsantanna on June 03, 2011 18:45:16

I'm waiting for that feature too.

Playing music inside archives like .zip, .rar, .7z, .tar.gz, etc... is a good way to maintain the archive the same way as you downloaded it, with is important to P2P file sharing. Most people donwload an archive from P2P, and have to decompress it to play the music inside. That way, you have two copies of the music on your computer, one to listen e another to share. But to free some space people delete the archive and than the file is not shared anymore. Players like foobar2000 can play music inside archives, that way you can seed the file on P2P and same time use it to listen. This is important to me because I use emule to share, and it does not support sharing entire folders like BitTorrent does. You have to archive an album if you want to share it. When we download music from http, like rapidshare, mediafire, megaupload, etc... we can't download an entire album at once if it is not archived. So archived music albums are very common. Amarok 2.x can't play it. And I don't know any other linux native player that can. At present I still use foobar2000 over wine. I know that on windows, Winamp also can play music inside archived files.

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From engelium on November 22, 2011 09:20:49

I totally agree... hope these feature will be added very soon :)

[Clementine-Issue-Importer]

From oracle2b on December 07, 2011 14:34:02

No progress on this yet but I'm using Deadbeef in the mean time to play .rar archive with https://github.com/shaohao/vfs_rar

[Zulgrib]

It would be useful for storage saving to be able to play music from compressed archives, 7zip is opensource, we could support this format.

[Ferroin]

I doubt that this is likely to be added. Using an archive file to store media is not generally a good practice, There are only two cases where it actually saves space:

1. You're storing uncompressed media (WAV files for example).
2. You're storing compressed media that was poorly encoded. In the first case, you should be encoding the audio using a lossless codec like FLAC (Seriously, using FLAC with max compression will save you space compared to WAV files in the same sample format in a ZIP file). In the second case, you should be re-compressing things yourself if possible, and only if you can't should you be using something like this. The only reason people use ZIP files for distributing music is because they're portable and let you download a single file instead of however many you purchased.

As far as the people talking about wanting this for Linux, the reason it doesn't exist there is because you have tools like Archivemount, Gvfs, and fuse-zip which let you access archive files through a regular filesystem interface (kind of like what the stock file manager in Windows does, but for all applications).