<> *4@5 STILL DRIVING HARDER !!!! *3]5@4 by Slade / A51 *1]1 @1 All you need to know about your hard drive can be learnt here. Okay, on that last note this will probably be the last hard drive tutorial as I'm running out of subjects to deal with. The subject for this month is Compression. To use this tutorial to it's fullest you will need a copy of MCP (Master Control Program) and a copy of a compressor such as Xpatanta or CrM. I recommend a copy of each actually! Okay, firstly I have been using CrunchMania for some time. I compress all of my modules on my hard drive with the sample mode on and I save about 11megs. This is a lot when you only have a 320meg hard drive. I also use it to crunch a lot of other stuff, including a lot of text that I have on my hard drive. I was thinking of crunching all my source code, but this doesn't amount to much anyway! I also make a lot of use of a program called FileMaster. This causes a problem with the RTDD (Run-Time Data Decruncher) of CrM. It crashes! :( Which is a bummer! I am now changing everything that I crunched with CrM over to the XPK libraries. This is including all the modules, they were converted to the SQSH library. This library is for the compression of 8-bit samples, so it works very well on modules. The next bit is where MCP comes in. The modplayer that I use (Hippoplayer), decrunches the modules automatically, but OctaMED doesn't! Using MCP's CrunchPatch function I was able to set up auto decompression for OctaMED as well. The SQSH library also decompresses faster than CrunchMania ever did. Also, nine times out of ten the compression is better too. I have also been playing around with MCP a little over the past few weeks. It is only when you configure the program that it really starts to show how good it really is. I have just added an ALT-TAB system as a hotkey. You know, like on the crappy PC! This is much easier than click to front. I have also added a few other hotkeys, including the small Enter key now zips up my windows and CTRL and ESC now does a fast reboot! I am currently using a beta version of v1.22 which I got from the official MCP website, so these may not be in your version. As this version is a beta version I don't think many PD libraries will have it.