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[gospelmastering]

I was told by my mentor NEVER to .ZIP an audio file. Is that no longer true? He said zipping an audio file can lead to unrecoverable errors at the other end.

I would be interested in knowing what the real truth is.

As pointed out by the others Zipping and audio compressing are two different concepts. Zipping is lossless so there is really no harm done.  The main reason for zipping is, as Ruairi O Flaherty pointed out, is to safeguard the upload is ok.  If the zipped file can be un-zipped then it's 100% sure that the upload was successful.  Otherwise the builtin checksum of the zipping program will complain.

Another main reason for zipping is the so-called Binary vs ASCII issue.  Without zipping some FTP program will use the ASCII mode to upload which is meant for simple text.  By zipping most FTP program know it should be transferred by binary mode.  With ASCII mode even with 100% successful upload the resultant files are quite different from the original files.

A lot of our clients use DM too.  But we prefer a local vendor here in Bay Area called New Cyberian, http://www.newcyberian.com.  Their digipak quality is way better than DM in my humble opinion.  DM is ok, but simply not the best and is far from being the de facto standard.  I'd like to encourage DM to improve its customer services because every time I called I had to repeat the story and was never able to talk to the same person. 

[mastermind]

I agree that zip'ing a file (or files - as in the case of a DDP file set) make the transfer more robust.

Strangely, when uploading Eric Benet's last master to Warner, they were very specific that if you uploaded zip'd DDP file sets, that they needed to be zipped with NO data compression. Apparently there is a way to do this, although I never investigated.  In any case, they refused my zip'd (and data compressed) files (they compare file size pre and post extration to see if it was data compressed). Since I didn't want to take the time to figure out how to zip with no actual data compression, I just uploaded the DDP files as-is.... no zip'ing.

I received such a stern response form them in regards to this, I felt it necessary to investigate the matter, so I zip'd some DDP's, on both Macs and PCs, up-zip-ing on different computers and then re-importing into Wavelab... in each and ever instance I got the files to null.... I couldn't get then to not null.... so my impression of the data compression in a zip file is that it is solid.

I also upload to Discmakers a lot....   never a problem.

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