Recommend me a lossless codec—looking for a nice compression–to–speed Options

[Dario]

Howdy, people from Hydrogenaudio

As per the topic's title, I am looking for a lossless codec that offers a nice compression (something around Monkey's Audio's High) along with a nice encoding/decoding speed (I am more concerned about the decoding). I initially stumbled upon TAK, which had everything I could ask for, but much to my demise, I found out that the playback of TAK is rather buggy—the official Winamp plug-in does not work well with 24/96 files (even though the TAK format supports high resolutions). Furthermore, I would ideally want the codec to be stable.

I would be very grateful to anyone who helps.

PS: Before mentioning FLAC, I have to say that I am dissatisfied with the compression it offers, as my storage space is pretty limited (and won't be improving until this summer at earliest).

[n0v!ze]

For years, I've been using FLAC and only recently switched to True Audio. Two to five out of hundred rips didn't play properly in Winamp with cue_in, some songs stopped right in the middle. Time display is always a few seconds behind. Well, this may all be related to cue_in or other things related to my machine and not to FLAC. Don't want to blame FLAC here, it's a great tool.

The True Audio Encoder ttaenc has two perceived disadvantages: Nearly no compression options and inability to redirect output to a pipe. For the type of music I listen to, which is mostly Heavy Metal, I found that the generated files sizes of .flac and .tta are nearly identical when compression to FLAC is done with second best ratio (Q 7 out of 8). Both encoding and decoding speed are at least on the same level, my (unverified) impression is that True Audio is often faster. Should I ever need the pipe output, I will apply the patch provided by the sox developer.

An advantage of True Audio is that it supports ID3 Tags. I create both lossless and lossy files when I rip. Having the very same id3 tags in both formats makes file management easier (for example file and folder name generation from tags). True Audio lacks a metatta utility but I didn't use metaflac anyway so I'm not missing it. True Audio is Open Source Software like FLAC is. Like FLAC, it lacks active development for a couple of years. Perhaps WavPack is the better, actively developed alternative? I don't know.