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).

[Ouroboros]

FLAC and TAK are within 2% of each other.......

FLAC vs TAK

[Dario]

FLAC and TAK are within 2% of each other.......

FLAC vs TAK

That test was made with TAK 2.0.0, the later versions (2.1.0 and 2.2.0) improved both compression and speed by a nice amount. As a matter of fact, TAK offers a much nicer compression than FLAC—even higher than Monkey's Audio's High (albeit by a tiny bit) on most of the albums I had ripped.

If decoding speed is an issue you apparently aren't using a desktop or tethered laptop for playback, so at the minimum you've left out one important piece of information. More details needed - you've made an unusual request and don't appear to have adequately explained what your constraints are.

I am using a desktop, but it's pretty old (Pentium D @ 3 GHz, 2 GB DDR2 RAM), so decoding and playing back a file compressed with Monkey's Audio's Very High (or something similar) is a—pardon my language—pain in the ass.

I remember trying WavPack with the -x 6 switch, but the encoding took way too much time.

This post has been edited by Dario: Jan 26 2012, 00:53

[washu]

I am using a desktop, but it's pretty old (Pentium D @ 3 GHz, 2 GB DDR2 RAM), so decoding and playing back a file compressed with Monkey's Audio's Very High (or something similar) is a—pardon my language—pain in the ass.

As someone who has used Monkey's Audio extra high since a PIII was a fast computer I find this comment strange. Even on my single core Atom netbook playback takes an insignificant amount of CPU.

Now conversion is another matter, I wouldn't want to use my Atom regularly for that.