Archive

An archive file is a container format (like tar or zip). It can contain arbitrary files or other types of named data. Archives can be stored as one single file (file archive) or as a directory (directory archive). The type of the archive is determined automatically by the archive option path.

Archives are used mainly for the caching of acoustic features, FLF Lattice, and alignment storage. The keys (or names) of the data streams (features, aligments, …) in the archive are the segment names.

A set of archives can be combined to a single archive using the Archiver Tool.

Configuration

path

Pathname of the archive. If path is a directory or ends with a /, a directory archive is used. A file archive is used in all other cases.

allow-overwrite

allow overwriting of existing files inside the archive (only for file archives)

Bundle Archive

Another kind of archive combination is a bundle archive. A bundle archives contains a list of archives: one path per line. The bundle archive must have the filename extension .bundle. It can be used like a normal archive. Bundle archives are read-only. Example: feature.cache.bundle

/work/user/my/experiment/data/features.cache.1
/work/user/my/experiment/data/features.cache.2
/work/user/my/experiment/data/features.cache.3

This creates a virtual combination of all 3 archives.

On first traversal, RASR will create a file ending in .bundle.idx.gz that contains a map from segment name to cache number to speed up further access.

Bundles are read-only archives.

Bundles support parameter *.max-open-files that allows to restrict the number of open file handles (in order to avoid exceeding RLIMIT_NOFILE).