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ATIH 2015 handling of MP3 files

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Does ATIH 2015 recognize files that are already compressed such as mp3, AAC and other audio files? If so, does it simply copy that file into the tib structure?
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Does ATIH 2015 blindly attempt to compress any file it encounters in the backup process?
Thanks,
-- George --

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How ATI handles compression will depend on your compression settings for the task. That being said, I did a quick backup of a selection of .M4A files using normal compression and max compression to see what if anything could be done.

Combined file size (87 files, 14 folders) - 1.04GB (1,122,991,964 Bytes)
TIB size normal compression - 1.01GB (1,094,675,968 Bytes)
TIB size max compression - 1.01GB (1,092,995,584 Bytes)

Obviously Acronis did attempt to compress the files with the normal setting, and consequently didn't squeeze them much more on max setting.
Given that you elected to use the word "blindly" it seems to me that you feel this is a waste of time/energy/something and should in fact not be happening.
The question I raise for you is ... Does this matter?

OK, so you're saying that ATIH doesn't discriminate between file types before executing its compression process?

My "blindly" question was aimed at discovering the analysis sophistication of ATIH 2015. He's why:

The programs that convert analog audio and video inputs to MP3, MP4, AAC and other digital storage files have specific compression methods so playback accurately reflects the original analog signal. My concern is that applying an additional compression algorithm that knows nothing about the original analog audio or video signal would have a negative effect on it.

In other words, ATIH 2015 should be commanded to ignore all audio and video files before doing a backup. Subsequently, a 2nd backup pass should be run to collect audio and video files into a different tib container file with a "no compression" setting, or just keep a master copy of those files on another disk.

Is this an accurate understanding of the ATIH 2015 process?

Thanks,

-- George --

Here's another way to state my question:

Does ATIH2015 "see" an MP3, m4A, AAC file name extension when running its backup process and switch to only "collecting" the file without applying any additional compression?

If it doesn't do this, the audio/video files could be damaged.

Thanks

-- George --

No, TI does not treat MP3, m4A, or AAC files any differently than any other file.

MP3, JPEG, etc. are lossy compression algorithms. In other words, the output is an approximation of the input. Some information is discarded during the compression process. The process cannot be reversed, so the output file can never be restored to be an exact copy of the source before encoding. Some of these approximations are very good and hard to tell from the original, but the compression is irreversible.

The compression used by TI and zip files and other computer compression schemes is lossless. In other words, it can be reversed when the file is restored, and the restored file will be an exact duplicate of the source file. Lossless compression produces a larger file than lossy compression because no information is discarded.

You will note that compressing an already-compressed file may not save much space; this is generally true for MP3 and JPEG files. Whether you decide to compress your TI backup is up to you. But rest assured that the restored files will be identical to the source.

Try an experiment. Back up and restore a few music file with TI compression turned on. Compare the restored file to the original file and confirm that it has the exact same number of bytes.

Thanks for your description of the TI process as being a "lossless" process. That answers my concern about ATIH losing or changing bits in digital audio/video files in the backup process.
-- George --