TAK stands for (T)om’s lossless (A)audio (k)ompressor. Besides, it’s a throwback to a (not very philanthropic) character from Stephen King’s “Regulators”. Early semi-public evaluation versions operated under the working title YALAC .

Characteristics:

• High compression . The strongest mode is on a par with Monkey’s Audio High and OptimFrog’s Normal; for specific files such as classical music or voice recordings, it often outperforms both. This classification is based on the evaluation of hundreds of files of various styles; it definitely does not apply to every single file.
• High compression speed . I am currently not aware of any other compressor that works faster than TAK’s Turbo or Fast mode and achieves similar compression rates.
• Multi-core compressor . The compressor optionally generates up to four threads in order to take advantage of multi-core cpus.
• Very high decompression speed . It is at the level of FLAC and therefore significantly higher than most symmetrical compressors.
• Support for every popular audio format (not yet fully implemented).
• Streaming support . An info frame, which contains all the information required for decoding, is inserted into the compressed audio data every 2 seconds.
• Fault tolerance . A single bit error never damages the audio data for more than a maximum of 250 ms, since it is stored in completely independent frames of a maximum of this duration. The decoder processes even extremely damaged files, optionally replacing or removing the affected data with silence.
• Error detection . Every single frame is protected by a 24-bit checksum (CRC).
• MD5 checksums for quick identification of audio material (e.g. for searching for duplicates).
• Fast, sample-accurate access to any playback position . The file header contains a look-up table with index positions every second. Even without this table, efficient random access is possible; for this purpose, the synchronization codes of the frame headers and / or the offset values ​​optionally recorded in the frame header, which refer to the beginning of the previous and next frame, can be used.
• Metadata . A flexible and expandable structure allows the recording of non-audio data such as images or cuesheets.
• Playback plugins for Winamp and Foobar are currently available.
• An SDK provides other developers with decoding functions for integration into their applications. An extension to include coding functions is planned.

www.thbeck.de/Tak/Tak
wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=TAK
hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=120760
www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_input_tak
foobar.hyv.fi/?view=foo_input_tak

dsfTAKSource ~ TAK  DirectShow  Source  Filter

• Playback TAK audio files in any DirectShow Player (Windows Media Player, MediaPlayerClassic, …)
• Now supporting TAK 2.2.0 (multi-channel audio, …)
• Support UNICODE filenames and Sample Rates > 44.1 KHz
• Upgrade: now correctly works in Windows 7 64bit !  (and other 64bit Windows versions)

liviocavallo.altervista.org