Possible to play zips and rars with music in them?

[iPodFoo]

I've often wondered if it was possible to play zips or rars with music files in them like foobar can?

Would it be too cpu intensive decompressing then playing it back?

[karashata]

Right now there's no way to do so, and I'm not entirely sure the devs want to add that kind of support. Decompressing zip and rar files is something better done on a PC (or Mac) rather than on a DAP since most DAPs don't have very fast processors. Plus, I don't think most music files compress very well anyway (I know MP3s don't compress well at all from personal experience), so you're ultimately not saving much in the way of hard drive space if that's what your intention is...

[funman]

It's possible to skip the compression part when creating zip/rar, so it becomes simple archiving (like UNIX tar).

Like you said karashata it's useless to compress files already compressed (with any codec for example).

Supporting that kind of files would be doable without much trouble on the CPU side, though I'm not sure how cleanly it could be implemented in rockbox: the complex part would be how to separate 1 file (the zip/rar) into several audio files which potentially use different codecs.

My opinion is that it's pointless to support such files when they can be decompressed easily when copying from the computer:
Instead of drag&drop, do right button drag&drop and unzip here, not even an additional single mouse click needed (works with winzip/winrar/7zip)

[iPodFoo]

It's possible to skip the compression part when creating zip/rar, so it becomes simple archiving (like UNIX tar).

Yeh, thats what i was thinking of, so all the files are in one file.

It would be useful for listening to zips and rars of free albums and mixes available online. Would save having to extract the files everytime, but I can understand it could be too cpu intensive.

[saratoga]

TAR style archives that don't use compression could probably be done, but it would be a lot of work to integrate into rockbox.

[iPodFoo]

Would kind of defeat the purpose of useability if you could only use TAR's! Be even more of a pain converting normal zips and rars to TARs wouldnt it? 

[saratoga]

Would kind of defeat the purpose of useability if you could only use TAR's! Be even more of a pain converting normal zips and rars to TARs wouldnt it? 

"TAR style archives that don't use compression" not "TAR and nothing else".

[AlexP]

I think the main point here is not which format to use, but just that it is a lot of work for negligible gain.

[iPodFoo]

Fair enough