Occasionally I’m contacted by people who have MP3+G zip files that cannot be read by PyKaraoke. The usual warning that PyKaraoke gives when it encounters these ZIP files is “Zip member compressed with unsupported type (9)”.

The problem is that PyKaraoke uses Python’s built in zipfile module, but this does not support all ZIP compression methods (only ZIP_STORED and ZIP_DEFLATED as described here).

A workaround for this is to unzip and rezip your collection of MP3+Gs using one of the above compression methods. Thankfully a PyKaraoke user has provided a shell script they wrote to do the work for you. This is available here, and his usage instructions are as follows:

Basically, I just put it in the same directory as my zip files and make sure there is at least a *done* directory below it…and if you want it to make backups, then put a *bkup *directory below it too.  Then just run ./rezip and let it go to work.  When it’s done, all of your reziped files will be in the *done* directory.  BTW, I’m running this on RedHat Fedora…zip and unzip came w/ it.  I’m assuming there’s a readily available zip/unzip RPM or whatever for other flavors of Linux and the -options are the same…if not, here’s what my -options mean.

*unzip -j* disregards the path in the zip file
*zip -mq* move into zip file and delete file, quiet operation