Tak Lossless Audio

TAK is a lossless audio compressor, similar to FLAC, WavPack and Monkey's Audio. On average, lossless compression reduces the file size to about 50 percent of the original size; however the compression can vary between approximately 30 and 70 percent, depending on the file. Decompression restores a bit identical copy of the original audio data (that's why we call it lossless).

My goal was to develop a compressor which combines good compression with optimal decoding speeds. On average, the current implementation should match the compression efficiency of Monkey's Audio High, while achieving decompression speeds similar to FLAC.

Features

 

• Good compression. The strongest mode (Extra) is on par with Monkey's Audio High and OptimFrog Normal. TAK's fastest mode (Turbo) easily outperforms FLAC's strongest mode. This classification is based upon the evaluation of hundreds of files of different genres; it may not be the case for every file that you compress.
• Fast compression speed. Currently I know of no other compressor which compresses faster than TAK's Turbo and Fast modes, while providing similar compression ratios.
• Very fast decompression speed. The decoding speeds achieved are similar to, and often surpassing, those achieved by FLAC.
• Support for any common audio format (not fully implemented).
• Streaming support. An info frame, which contains all the information required to decompress a file, is inserted into the compressed audio data every 2 seconds.
• Error tolerance. A single bit error will never affect more than 250 ms of the audio data, as the compressed data is being stored in independent frames no more than that duration. The decoder is able to decompress even badly damaged files, by removing corrupt frames or replacing them with silence.
• Error detection. Each single frame is protected by a 24-bit checksum (CRC).
• Fast and sample accurate seeking. The file header contains a seektable with seekpoints (at 1 second intervals). In the absence of the seektable seeking can still be achieved by using the sync codes of the frame headers and the (optional) relative offset values contained in each info frame, which are pointing to the previous and next info frame.
• Meta data. A flexible and extensible structure in which to embed non audio data.

Application Details:

Developer:	Thomas Becker
URL:	http://www.thbeck.de/Tak/Tak.h...

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