Really good compression tool

ok so anyone know of a compression tool that really compresses the heck out of a file? winzip isn't cutting it for me, even their supposed Maximum compression isn't good enough. time doesn't matter to me, i just need files to be as small as possible. and as always, free is good, and so is password protection option. i've searched around, but haven't been able to find anything.

compressed.

If you are on win, winrar is pretty good.

better compression than winzip?

you could also get cygwin and try bzip2 and tgz (tar compression) but I have never really compared them to zip compression.

any industrial strength compression tools out there?

What kind of compression rates you get is going to depend on what kind of data you're compressing and what algorithms are used.

Binary data like jpgs and mpgs aren't going to compress as much as text files will (usually).

As far as asking for "industrial strength" compression, zip, gzip and bzip2 are pretty darn "industrial" given that they are standard and used all over the place.

ok, lets say mp3. i know they are already compressed, but is there a way to take it a step further? or jpgs?

They are already highly compressed. If you want to make your MP3s smaller, probably the most effective way would be to discard more information by encoding them at a lower bitrate.

I suggest you read up on how compression works to see why you're not going to get incredible compression rates on that kind of data. What kind of rates are you looking for, anyway? Multimedia files are large. Encoding life is messy.

MP3s can be converted to AACs (MPEG-4, Advanced Audio Coding)

JPGs can have their quality level reduced, or for certain images, converted to GIFs or PNGs.

If you want an all purpose compressor, you'll have to stick with one of the standards, mentioned in a previous post.

You can actually get Win32 binaries of bzip2 and bunzip2. You don't need cygwin to run them.

Yeah, that is true, but you get a lot of other powerfull utilities with cygwin.