Hey all. Anybody know a compression algo that is fast to uncompress. Compress time is not important. Thx!

Well, the data is sound. I know of some obvious ones, I''m just wondering how fast they could be decompressed. MP3 seems complicated and slow, but if it''s fast, that would be great. It can be lossy, as long as the original sound is kept basically intact.

The reason why I''m doing this, is I don''t have a lot of memory to work with. It would be nice to have a bank of compressed sound, then uncompress them as they are needed. So, decompression needs to be very fast, fast enough to run in the engine. Thx.

I don''t know much about compression but here''s a few thoughts:

Have you tried cutting the bitrates down...certainly a rate of 22000 still sounds as good as 44000 (to me at least) ?

Have you considered some sort of caching scheme so that frequently used sounds are likely to be in memory and decompressed ?

It might be possible to use some aspects of the MP3 compression scheme to improve the efficiency of other schemes. For example, I''ve heard somewhere that that MP3 compression implements a cut-off filter for sound above 5kHz...I think that helps to reduce the data set to compress a bit.

I''m sorry if this is all useless...

NickB