License for rar support?

[Firefly1]

Is there any plans to license the creation of rars? I’m considering powerarchiver, but the lack of rar creation is a sever negative, might as well buy winrar then.

[spwolf]

it is not possible to license creation of rars… we do have fastest unrar :-).

[Firefly1]

That is unfortunate. While fast unrar is great, the inability to make them is a big deal breaker

[davidsplash]

would everyone pay more if they could have rar total support i know i would. You could implement my suggestion and intergrate rar command line into pa with people haveing to buy the command line version of rar from winrar in oder to get all the features of rar to work in pa.

come on do this and both winrar and you get the best of both world winrar comand line sales would go through the roof and pa could cflaim full rar compatbility vuia the winrar’s command line if you purchase it.

No licensinmg issue here and you get to use pas interface and rar command line as one.

winrar can’t complain and it would increase their sales and yours

[spwolf]

@Firefly1:

That is unfortunate. While fast unrar is great, the inability to make them is a big deal breaker

we do offer zipx, 7zip, ISO creation, which rar doesnt… tools, backups, etc, etc.

[davidsplash]

powerarchiver offer plugins rar doesn’t

[Firefly1]

Sorry for the slow reply

What tangible benefits do plugins give me if rars can’t be made? The other formats are freely available. If I were to use power archiver + winrar I would be buying twice for no gain, the additional features can again be achieved with other free tools too. I don’t see the reason why I should buy this + winrar than use free tools

[davidsplash]

why do you need to use rar ask yourself that

[orbidia]

So here’s an obvious answer…

Someone has a hard drive with some archived stuff on it in RAR format. And they want to simply add a file into the archive without extracting everything and then recreating a new archive in another format. People have been using RARs for a long time and there’s bound to be a lot of cases where they need to modify or change RAR archives.

I don’t really understand why this proposed solution of using WinRAR/Command Line RAR.exe to enable full RAR support in PowerArchiver has not been adopted. PowerArchiver has the superior interface and more format support and features but it forces people to still use winrar because it doesn’t support creating or modifying RAR archives.

PowerArchiver has been around a long time and I don’t understand why it can’t incorporate an optional plugin to work with either the WinRAR program or WinRAR command line. Even if WinRAR needed to be installed to get RAR creation support in PowerArchiver, it would be nice to never have to use WinRAR again and have context menus disabled for it etc… But that can’t be done until PowerArchiver can create RARs.

Directory Opus does this already by using an installed version of WinRAR to enable full RAR support within the program. How come PowerArchiver can’t? If you REALLY want to be the best archiver program, I’m afraid this functionality is going to have to be added at some point…

Other than that, PowerArchiver is obviously the best Archiving program ever. Hopefully that one last hurdle can be overcome.

[RJWaring]

RAR has many advantage’s so it would be nice in time to see PA with the ability to Write RAR’s… However, what is also important with an archive tool is features, reliability and compatibility and PowerArchiver hosts that and more!

I’m fine using the formats PA Offer to write, knowing i can read practically all other formats. I also know there is so much more to come in this great app and that’s why i continue to pay for upgrade’s not to mention dedicate much of my free time testing, and offering advise, ideas and potential solutions because ConeXware does something the other competitors dont!

[spwolf]

@orbidia:

So here’s an obvious answer…

Someone has a hard drive with some archived stuff on it in RAR format. And they want to simply add a file into the archive without extracting everything and then recreating a new archive in another format. People have been using RARs for a long time and there’s bound to be a lot of cases where they need to modify or change RAR archives.

I don’t really understand why this proposed solution of using WinRAR/Command Line RAR.exe to enable full RAR support in PowerArchiver has not been adopted. PowerArchiver has the superior interface and more format support and features but it forces people to still use winrar because it doesn’t support creating or modifying RAR archives.

PowerArchiver has been around a long time and I don’t understand why it can’t incorporate an optional plugin to work with either the WinRAR program or WinRAR command line. Even if WinRAR needed to be installed to get RAR creation support in PowerArchiver, it would be nice to never have to use WinRAR again and have context menus disabled for it etc… But that can’t be done until PowerArchiver can create RARs.

Directory Opus does this already by using an installed version of WinRAR to enable full RAR support within the program. How come PowerArchiver can’t? If you REALLY want to be the best archiver program, I’m afraid this functionality is going to have to be added at some point…

Other than that, PowerArchiver is obviously the best Archiving program ever. Hopefully that one last hurdle can be overcome.

i like the solution in directory opus…

[y2kusuma]

@Sir:

RAR has many advantage’s so it would be nice in time to see PA with the ability to Write RAR’s… However, what is also important with an archive tool is features, reliability and compatibility and PowerArchiver hosts that and more!

I hope PAF format will have more advantages than RAR so we can forget about RAR.

[spwolf]

@y2kusuma:

I hope PAF format will have more advantages than RAR so we can forget about RAR.

it should be better than rar in any way, at least when we are done with it… but they do make a good point, it is not like everyone or even our most advanced users, simply convert every rar they have.

which is why we have also optimized unrar in past to be faster than in wr

[davidsplash]

one simple way is to write your own plugin to use the command line version of rar which is exactly what i did and it works to a fashion though to make it leagle you have to buy rar . The only downside to my plugin is that i can not use recovery part to rar though i hope pa will eventaully resolve this problem and make rar intergrated using the command line use and use. They would impliment a check to see if the command line rar is registered if yes full commandline use would be allowed if not omly unrar options will be allowed .

Come on power archiver this option is agrable with rarlabs i have checked with them and as long as anyone buys a copy of there commandline they dont care how you use it.

[orbidia]

@davidsplash:

You have a plugin which allows owners of commandline RAR to work with Powerarchiver?
Is this posted anywhere? If not, can you please post it? That’s what everyone here wants!

Yes, it doesn’t matter if an archive format comes out that’s twice as good as RAR. There’s literally millions of RAR files out there “archived” already. It’s nice to be able to extract them really fast but what about when I want to add a small .TXT file to the archive? I drag it into the archive and I get an annoying crossout symbol. If I don’t have WinRAR, I now have to extract the entire archive and and then recreate the whole thing in another format. Or I have to close down Power Archiver and open WinRAR and then I can simply add the .TXT file. So I need to own RAR anyways. It sure would be nice to NOT have to use two programs which do the same thing. I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t mind owning both if that’s the best way to work around this problem. It’s having to use both that’s annoying…

@davidsplash: will your plugin allow files to be added to RAR files directly? Can one drag a .txt file into the Power Archiver window and get a plus sign for RAR files? Or does that need tighter integration?

I’d love to NOT have any context menu items for WinRAR for example or not to ever have to actually open the WinRAR again except to install it… but that’s currently not possible.

I’m very happy to hear that spwolf seems to understand this issue.

Happy Holidays everyone!

[davidsplash]

i do have a plugin but it works with the commandline version of winrar. but i can not post it as it is big and a bit buggy at present. But i was hoping that pa would come up with an official plugin that wasnt buggy

[Mili]

Orbidia,
if it would make things easier(I don’t see it mentioned in detail), you can use the archive converter tool in PA to convert your RAR archive into another format, without having to extract and compress it separately. Then you’ll be able to use that archive to add files to your liking.

[davidsplash]

take a look at MultiArc plugin for total commander it is a lot further down the oad than my plugin and does work with rar o a point.

not sure it works with pa but as pa uses total commander plugins it shouldnt be too hard to reconfigure it.

[spwolf]

@spwolf:

i like the solution in directory opus…

you should consider my post above as a tell tale

[alexgieg]

I’d like to suggest an alternative solution to this. What I’d like to see would be for PA to offer a generic solution for those who need 3rd party compression engines integrated into the main program as some kind of advanced options window in which you could add a file type, then add simple text field where one would simply write the different command lines needed to achieve certain standard outcomes.

So, for example, do you want to have support for, let’s say, the very uncommon “KGB” file type? You’d add a new “KGB” file type, under it the different command lines for, let’s say, create a new archive, add files to an existing archive, remove individual files from an existing archive, extract files, test the archive, and so on and so forth. Throw in some needed magic variables such as “%archive_path%”, “%archive_name%”, “%file_path%”, “%file_name%” etc. (with suitable variations such as “%lowercase_file_name%”, “%uppercase_file_name%”, “%8.3_file_name%” and the like), plus the ability for such custom commands to appear in the context menu, and presto, every advanced and/or non-standard user out there would be more than happy.

Over time forum users would be able to provide their own sets of typical command lines for those without the time or inclination to figure them out by themselves. The most used ones (or even all, why not?) could then be added to PA as presets, so that one might simply select “RAR”, “KGB” etc. from a drop down list, and be done with it.

This wouldn’t be, I guess, particularly difficult to provide, all the while being much easier to use for non-programmers than having them write full fledged plugins. And PA would only need to test for the existence of the executable.