Beta release 1 of TAK 2.1.0 ((T)om's lossless (A)udio (K)ompressor)
It consists of:
- TAK Applications 2.1.0 Beta 1
- TAK Winamp plugin 2.1.0 Beta 1
- TAK Decoding library 2.1.0 Beta 1
The final release will additionally contain the SDK.
Download:
Download link removed. Beta 2 has been released.
What's new
This release adds a new user selectable codec, which significantly improves the compression efficiency of LossyWav-processed files. Files compressed with this codec can not be decoded by earlier versions of Tak, Takc, in_tak and tak_deco_lib! The default codec remains unchanged und is therefore backwards compatible to TAK V2.0.0.
Improvements:
- New additional codec that improves the compression efficiency of LossyWav-processed files by up to about 2 percent (relative to the original file size) for the quality setting -q5.0 (less or more for other settings). It supports any block size that is an integer multiple of 256 samples. Please don't specify the -fsl512 option at the command line. While this was required for the standard codec, it will severily hurt the performance of the new dedicated LossyWav-codec. Another advantage of the new codec: You will not loose much compression if LossyWav deceides to remove no bits, as can happen with for instance some low amplitude files with little signal complexity. Simply specify -cLW at the command line to activate the new codec. Earlier it wasn't advantegous to use presets higher than -p2m when encoding LossyWav-Files. That's no longer true, you may even benefit from -p4m.
Modifications:
- The file info function now also shows the name of the codec used to compress the file. The new codec is called "3 LossyWav (TAK 2.1)".
- Moved the verify-option from the details-dialog to the general compression options dialog.
Known issues:
- If you use pipe decoding and the application reading the pipe is beeing terminated before the whole file has been read, TAKC may get into an endless loop and has to be manually killed with the task manager. I don't think this is a big issue but i will try to fix it in one of the next versions. BTW: Big thanks to shnutils for testing the pipe decoding!
- There seem to be some compatibility issues with pipe decoding to some other applications ("crc1632.exe" has been reported). I will try to fix it in the next release.
Results
Here are some compression results for my primary test corpus. First a comparison of different codecs and LossyWav quality settings.
Comparison of Codecs
FLAC 1.2.1 TAK 2.0 TAK 2.1 Advantage over
-8 -p2m -p4m FLAC TAK 2.0
-q0.0 20,61 19,07 17,25 3,36 1,82
-q2.5 27,43 25,95 23,93 3,50 2,02
-q5.0 33,26 31,78 29,62 3,64 2,16
-q7.5 38,79 37,28 35,03 3,76 2,25
Compression in percent relative to the original file size.
Sometimes LossyWav deceides not to remove any or only very few bits from a file. Then it can happen, that the LossyWav-Mode of the codec is less efficient then the standard mode. To test this i used a worst case scenario. I compressed my test corpus with TAK's standard (-cStd) and LossyWav (-cLW) codec, but without prior processing with LossyWav.
Compression of unprocessed files
TAK 2.1 TAK 2.1
-cStd -cLW Loss
-p0 58,74 58,99 -0,25
-p1 57,84 57,73 0,11
-p2 56,90 57,00 -0,10
-p3 56,36 56,44 -0,08
-p4 56,02 56,06 -0,04
-p4m 55,88 55,97 -0,09
Since the presets of the 2 codecs are constructed slightly different, they are not directly comparable. But i think it is safe to say, that the average loss is usually not bigger than about 0.1 percent.
Encoding and decoding speed are close to the standard codec, therefore i conducted no tests.
Beta testing
The beta version has already gone through extensive testing performed by my automatic scripts. Please try the beta release and report any bugs in this thread.
Thanks for testing and have fun
Thomas