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 present 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 extra 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.

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

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.

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).