💧 Aqueous

Aqueous is an archive format and an archiver, aqr, built around lossless recompression. Most files people keep are already compressed, by encoders far weaker than what a modern machine can afford: JPEG’s and MP3’s Huffman codes, deflate in PNG, ZIP, PDF and gzip, LZ4 and Snappy in browser profiles and databases. Aqueous undoes that compression, codes the contents with stronger models, and rebuilds the original files bit for bit on extraction.

• Recompressors for a long and growing list of formats, each in its own crate under codecs/ with a FORMAT.md describing what it stores. To name some: images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, PSD, Clip Studio Paint, BMP and PNM, BCn textures in DDS), audio and video (MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, WAV and AIFF, FMOD sound banks, ProRes, Matroska and WebM), documents and data (PDF, SQLite, HDF5, FITS, CSV and JSON Lines, plain text, FASTA, Wavefront OBJ, gettext catalogs, GGUF models), archives and images of discs (ZIP, 7z, RAR, tar, ar and cpio, ISO 9660 and UDF, CAB and CHM, LHA, ALZ and EGG, Electron’s asar, git packs), the compressors found in and around them (deflate in gzip and zlib, LZMA and xz, bzip2, LZ4, Snappy, LZO,…