User:Speck-Made/TAK (audio codec)

TAK (Tom's lossless Audio Kompressor) 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.

Pros

 * Fast encoding speed
 * Tak “Extra” encodes as fast as Flac -8 while providing better compression
 * Tak “Turbo” encodes several times faster than FLAC -8 while providing better compression
 * 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
 * Very limited software support (only Winamp & foobar2000 plugins at the moment)
 * Tagging is not mature at the moment (APEv2 tags can be added using third party software)

Software that support TAK

 * TAK SDK 2.1.0 – Software Development Kit for TAK
 * Winamp Plugin 1.0.2
 * foo_input_tak, TAK decoder for foobar2000
 * Mp3tag (since version 2.38), Multifeatured-multiformat freeware tagger
 * AIMP3 Beta (decoding)
 * TAK is known to run on Linux via WINE
 * DeaDBeef - The Ultimate Music Player for Linux supports TAK since 0.5.6
 * MusicBrainz Picard supports TAK since 0.11

Recommended Settings

 * Best compression: “Extra” preset with “Maximum” switch
 * Fastest compression: “Turbo” preset
 * use APEv2 tagging (will be used as internal tagging)

Future Features

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