TAK (audio codec)

Infobox Software
name = Tom’s verlustfreier Audiokompressor



caption =
developer = Thomas Becker
latest_release_version = 1.0.4
latest_release_date = March 11 2008
latest preview version =
latest preview date =
operating_system = Windows
genre = Audio codec, Audio file format
license = Closed Source
website = [http://thbeck.de/Tak/Tak.html thbeck.de/Tak/Tak.html]

Tom’s verlustfreier Audiokompressor (TAK, German for "Tom’s lossless audio compressor", he also calls it "Tom’s lossless Audio Kompressor" sometimes) is a lossless audio compressor which promises compression performance similar to Monkey’s Audio “High” and decompression speed similar to FLAC. The codec also supports streaming (necessary headers for decompressing the audio are written to the stream every 2 seconds), error tolerance (single bit error will never affect more than 250 ms) and detection with checksums in compressed audio streams. While the basic format is ready and safe to use, many features such as internal tagging, playback support for other players are yet to be implemented.

The reference implementation are two Windows applications – one with graphical and one with command line interface – currently written in Pascal with Assembler optimizations.

Features

The current reference binary offers six presets with different levels of complexity (“Turbo”, “Fast”, “Normal”, “High”, “Extra” and “Insane”) that can be combined with two levels of extra evaluation (“Extra” and “Max”) for some additional compression sacrificing only compression time.

As of 1.0.3 there is piping support for encoding.

Pros

* Fast encoding speed (while providing better compression, TAK encodes as fast as FLAC -8 in TAK's “Insane” and several times faster in “Turbo” mode)
* Fast decompression speed (on par with FLAC / WavPack)
* Good compression levels (on par with Monkey’s Audio High)
* Error Robustness
* Fast Seeking

Cons

* Closed Source (at the moment)
* No hardware support. Since it is an asymmetric codec with very fast decoding it is an ideal candidate for hardware support, though.
* Very limited software support (only Winamp, Quintessential Media Player & foobar2000 plugins at the moment)
* Tagging is not mature at the moment (APEv2 tags can be added using third party software)
* Windows only

Future Features

* Internal tagging.
* Unicode support.
* MD5 audio checksums for verification and identification.
* A German version.
* Embedded cue sheets (currently works with foobar2000 plug-in).
* Embedded cover art. (currently works with mp3tag)
* Multichannel audio.

Software that support TAK

* TAK SDK – Software Development Kit for TAK
* Winamp/XMPlay Plugin
* foo_input_tak, TAK decoder for foobar2000
* TAK plug-in for Quintessential Player
* Native playback support included in Tuniac
* Mp3tag (since version 2.38), Multifeatured-multiformat freeware tagger
* shntool (since version 3.0.6)
* The TAK reference applications are both known to run on Linux via Wine. [ [http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=7660 Wine Application DB - Viewing App: Tak Lossless Audio 1.01 ] ]

Recommended Settings

The “Insane” preset with “Maximum” switch gives the best compression TAK can deliver (takc -e -p5m [input file] ); fastest compression is obtained with “Turbo” preset (takc -e -0 [input file] ).
APEv2 should be used as tagging scheme (will be used as internal tagging).

External links

* [http://thbeck.de/Tak/Tak.html thbeck.de/Tak/Tak.html] – official website "(German)"
* [http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=TAK wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=TAK] – entry in Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase
* [http://synthetic-soul.co.uk/comparison/lossless/ synthetic-soul.co.uk/comparison/lossless] – TAK in a comparison of lossless encoders
* [http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html flac.sf.net/comparison.html] – another comparison on the homepage of FLAC

References