TAK

From Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

General aspects of the format

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. 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.

Features

  • high compression
  • fast compression and decompression speed
  • Streaming support
  • Error tolerance
    • single bit error will never affect more than 250 ms
  • Error detection
    • each frame protected by a 24-bit checksum (CRC)

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 Foosion's decoder and MP3tag stubble)

Hardware and software that support TAK

Hardware

  • none

Software

  • TAK SDK 1.0.2 - Software Development Kit for TAK here
  • Winamp Plugin 1.0.2 here
  • foo_input_tak, TAK decoder for Foobar2000 here

Recommended Settings

  • Best compression: "Extra" preset with "Maximum" switch
 takc -e -p4m [input file]
  • Fastest compression: "Turbo" preset
 takc -e -p0 [input file]
  • use ApeV2 tagging (will be used as internal tagging)

Future Features

  • Internal tagging.
  • Unicode support.
  • Piping support.
  • MD5 audio checksums for verification and identification.
  • A german version.
  • Embedded cue sheets.
  • Embedded cover art.
  • Multichannel audio.

Frequently asked questions

  • to be added

External links