Previously I had my lossless collection (not very big, only about 20 Gig so far) in monkey's audio (extra high) format. I choose that because it was more for archiving than playing at the time, so I wasn't too concerned about speed and it beat just about everything else at the time for compression.

These days I'm listening to lossless more often. That's not the real issue though, monkey's extra high is not really that bad with a modern CPU, you still get a big 40% cpu usage spike when you seek, but for normal playback no real problems. The real decider was the fact that I'm more often encoding directly to my (flash memory) portable player. It's a crappy little player so I usually just encode to lame "V6" quality, but encoding monkey’s extra high to lame was pretty slow, it was taking over 20 seconds per typical song when encoding directly to the flash-memory portable.

Anyway I went with TAK1.1.1 at compression level "-p3e". I batch encoded my whole collection in a few hours and I ended up with 20.2GB of "p3e" tak files generated from 20.1GB of "extra-high" ape files (about 120MB more storage in total). This equates to about an extra 0.6% storage for the tak files, which really isn't too bad at all.

BTW. Now I've gone for the speedier option I'm encoding on the fly to my portable flash-memory player, TAK at "-p3e" to helix-mp3 at "-V50" and it's gone from in excess of 20 seconds per song before to about 4 seconds per song. Now I'm no longer storing any low quality mp3 copies (meant for my portable) on my hard drive.

This one time, at band camp ...

I jest, I actually like this story. It is proof of various statements that are regularly made regarding lossless codecs here:

1. If you have a lossless copy you can always change your mind.
2. Achieving the best compression should not always be the primary goal.
3. The benefit of better compression is relative to the size of the collection.

Enjoy.

I am also thinking about transcoding using a fast mp3 encoder. Having 2 collections (lossless/mp3) is slow + bloated.

If anyone know the reverse method (turning TAK's into money), I'd be very interrested


Only because noone designed a convenient method to handle it.

Yup, that's the thing you've gotta love about lossless.

I know that it's fairly common to talk about the "dangers" of having all your music in a closed source format like TAK, but in reality it's so easy to move from one lossless format to another that I cant see any problem. As long as I've got a PC platform and the command line decoder/encoder I can't see any issue. Really I just can't imagine Windows and the PC platform disappearing so quickly that I don't get a chance to transcode to a new format, and that's even in the worst case scenario that TAK is never ported to the "next" platform.

BTW. I already had a command line script that I wrote to recursively sweep though all the folders and subfolder in my lossless source folder and to build an exact copy of files and folders (but with the files transcoded to a new format) to a specified destination folder (it even transfers the tags). I just had to setup the script go from APE to TAK and it set it running, came back 2 or 3 hours later and I had the entire collection rebuilt to the new format. I just tested a few files at random (source and destination) to make sure they were bit perfect, which of course they were. Nice.

Don't you hate it when you make a dumb typo in the title of a thread and it's the one thing that you can't go back and edit. Actually I dropped letters in both tran(s)coding and mon(k)ey's in that title. Yikes.

Really, I do, but this one were funny

I, also, have extensively used Monkey's Audio and would like to transition to TAK. In my case I have my CD's backed up as well having all my home recorded audio tracks compressed and archived to optical disc. This is quite a bit of information.

For safety and easier access I will probably re-burn my backup/archive discs to the next-gen format (i.e. CD-R to DVD-R) and when in the midst of doing that I may be tempted to transcode from one lossless format to another. The big snag (for me): TAK doesn't have a Cool Edit plug-in at this time. In the case of the home recordings it would really be a time saver when doing a re-mix to have TAK's fast decoding speed natively read-in to CEP/Audition. I probably will wait to make the lossless change-over because of this.

Other than that, I think using TAK is good codec to use on desktop systems and would great to see in as many audio mixing programs.

[rant] I don't care if TAK is closed source. A lot of excellent programs (FB2k) are closed. All the FUD of dangers of closed-source code are just as irrelevant as the assumption that opening the code will make the program "better". [/rant]

This is about 17.4 TB, roughly 63% music tracks, 37% audio CD backups.

edit: My mistake, tried to edit and failed.

Futhermore, how difficult would it be to make a TAK plugin for Cool Edit/Audition using the existing tak_deco_lib.dll provided with the TAK distribution? I suck at programming but would love to beta test.

edit2: I guess an "official" CEP plugin would have to also encode, but I could live with a decode-only CEP plugin

Thanks for the story. I'm seriously considering switching from FLAC to TAK (I had previously switched from APE to FLAC, for reasons I can't completely remember atm) for my 200GB collection. I really could use the space improvements. Encode/decode time isn't a huge issue for me but it is a factor.

My only concern at this point is stability. Insofar as there have been relatively few TAK releases so far compared to other formats, how worried should I be about tagging oddities or decompression failures? I mean, yes, it has been very rigorously tested on this forum, but...

Quite a bit of information, you're not kidding. That's over 4000 single layer DVD's or about 750 single layer bluray discs.

Personally I've had some reliability issues with large optical media collections and found them a bit too much trouble to maintain. What optical media are you using?

Are you sure you really wanna do that? I have discussed it a dozen times already - I believe CD/DVD/BD's are not worth the hassle. It's EXTREEEEMELY time consuming to ensure backup to so many medias not to mention that a disc is not entirely reliable over years and less resistant to scratches etc if not handled properly. Even when you might think they are properly stored, the chemicals may corrupt the disc over years (I've seen a few bad examples of that).

That said, would you even care to make sure your backup works once in a while? What are your backups worth if you don't know if they can be restored at any time?

Harddrives are cheap these days - ALMOST as cheap as a good brand of optical discs, but they considerably reduces the time to backup and can easily be checked to make sure a restore works. Get some external drives and store them away in a second location (or if you want some fancy stuff, make a NAS and a remote NAS with online backup).

17TB - Really??? I thought I had much music, 35,000 tracks on 1TB.

Ugh, maybe I Michael Bolton-ed my guesstimate, not sure. It is a lot tho'

Don't know who else does this but I most the archived discs are CDRW media each in its own jewel box and the data verified after the burn. Usually this last step is an indication of how the media is doing: a dubious disc verifies slower than it burns. Other than I already had vast quantities of these RW discs on hand, my reasoning was along the lines of "if the disc can be re-written to more than once..." although practically speaking it isn't much different than -R media as far as resilience to corruption. Anyhoo...

I do often yank discs from the archive to pull files up either to load sessions into CEP or to get albums/tracks without re-ripping. So far no errors. :knocks on wood:

The idea is that if I decided the discs were going to get copied and re-burned that transcoding to TAK would not be much different than drag-and-drop except for the processing. Again, the changeover to TAK would have to require that a working CEP plugin existed (read-only is fine, I actually prefer to manage compressing the master tracks outside other programs).

I'm using TAK for more than 1.5 years by now and had no issues whatsoever (can be seen here), but I need TAK for archiving, seldom retagging, reencoding to mp3 or integrity checking, and never for playing...

I'd also like to mention Thomas indicated that his YALAC/TAK project had been ongoing 10 years before going to public beta testers.

No, I don't think stability is a TAK shortcoming