Compressing deliverable...or Apple MacOS how I dislike you...

[Lindon]

OK so this is not a HISE question - but I'm sure many of you have your own solutions so I'm interested to hear what they are. My situation:

I have several products that users can download (either as a demo or as a purchase) and each of these has an installer, some pdf documentation and some .hr files... here's an example:

I'm sure this is not unfamiliar to many of you...

So compressing this lot and offering it for download is problematic.....for Mac users. 95% of my support calls are about uncompressing problems, and 100% of these come from Mac users....

I've tried zipping them to multi-file solutions - Mac users can seem to get their head around how to uncompress this zip set, I've Rar-ed them up and pointed Mac users at a free utility and a video how to use it - still its a problem for them....

I'm at the point of making two completely separate downloads - where the Mac solution is one MASSIVE zip file (which in the case above would be a single 4.5GB file <- ugly to download and doubles my server disk space requirement).

Tell me - what do you do?

[Christoph Hart]

You can increase the split size to 2GB. I wouldn‘t recommend higher file sizes because older FAT systems dont‘t allow higher file sizes.

[d.healey]

I use both rar and zip multipart archives and get very few users reporting problems with them. What about putting the downloader directly in the plugin? I think the API functions are there to support this.

[Lindon]

@d-healey said in Compressing deliverable...or Apple MacOS how I dislike you...:

I use both rar and zip multipart archives and get very few users reporting problems with them. What about putting the downloader directly in the plugin? I think the API functions are there to support this.

Ok so what programs are you using for the rar and zip creation? - especially on the Mac platform.

[Christoph Hart]

Why would you want to use rar? MacOS can unzip .zip files without problems.

[d.healey]

@Lindon rars were created on Windows with winRaR, zips were created on GNUx. I point Mac users to unrarX for rar, I think Mac has built in zip support.

[Lindon]

@Christoph-Hart said in Compressing deliverable...or Apple MacOS how I dislike you...:

Why would you want to use rar? MacOS can unzip .zip files without problems.

more than willing to use zip - but it seems if I create a multifile zip archive:

myfile.zip
myfile.z01
myfile.z02

then Mac users cant seem to unzip this....

[Lindon]

@Lindon OK I guess this is a more appropriate question:

Does anyone (a mac user) know of any utility that will create multipart zip files on the Mac reliably?

By which I mean can be unzipped on Mac and Windows

[Christoph Hart]

Why do you want to zip the .hr1 files? They won't get smaller, but the user needs extra space for extracting them. Put all your installation / pdf files into one zip file and ship this with the .hr1 files with a split size of your preference.

[Lindon]

@Christoph-Hart said in Compressing deliverable...or Apple MacOS how I dislike you...:

Why do you want to zip the .hr1 files? They won't get smaller, but the user needs extra space for extracting them. Put all your installation / pdf files into one zip file and ship this with the .hr1 files with a split size of your preference.

Because its messy - they have no idea about hr files - so I then have to include some download instructions - and its a file server so its just a list of files...so even "Hey - just download your installer and all the hr files to get this to work" isnt there in their face...

[Dan Korneff]

@Lindon You could pop all the .hr1 files into a separate installer so the user never sees them. Then maybe use a post install script to create the Link file that contains the library location?
I currently deliver the sample library as a zip file, and then direct them to a youtube video on how to install the product. That has greatly reduced tech support emails, but using a separate installer would be sleek.

[d.healey]

I provide the .hr files as individual downloads (just as I would for multi-part zips) I also provide a link to installation instructions (you can link to my site if you want to use them). I've had only a handful of users who had problems with the first time installation.

[Lindon]

@d-healey & @dustbro -- yeah thanks.

It looks like I will go with zipped installers for mac - done on the mac , and zipped installer for windows - done on the win machine and provide the hr files separately -

so more download instructions to be written.... apple apple apple....when will you learn...