Beta release of TAK 1.1.2 ((T)om's lossless (A)udio (K)ompressor)

It consists of:

- TAK Applications 1.1.2 Beta 2
- Winamp plugin 1.1.2 Beta 2
- Decoding library 1.1.2 Beta 2

The final release will additionally contain the SDK.

Download:

Download link removed. TAK 1.1.2 Final has been released.

What's new

Beta 2, 2009-07-18

Improvements:

- Depending on preset and cpu up to 10 percent faster encoding and decoding compared with V1.1.1.

Beta 1, 2009-06-17

New Features:

- Tagging support for the command line encoder.

Improvements:

- Removed some more assembler routines and simplified a lot of code. Most binaries are again smaller now.
- Slightly faster encoding and decoding of LossyWav files.
- Slightly faster encoding and decoding if MMX is disabled and the pure pascal code is beeing used.
- Tiny general speedups for encoding and decoding on my Pentium Dual Core. My Sempron does not benefit from the optimizations.

Fixes:

- The new filter introduced in V1.1.1 revealed a bug in the encoder, which resulted in suboptimal performance especially when compressing LossyWav-files with the presets -p3 or -p4 (BTW: It doesn't make sense to go higher than -p2m when compressing LossyWav-files...).

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.

Tagging

For your convenience here follows the description of the tag command taken from the applications readme:


Some remarks:

Tagging is only available when encoding.

TAK does not distinguish between upper and lower case in the keys; therfore "key" and "KEY" are equivalent.

You may assign multiple values to the same key:


will create a tag item with the key "Artist" and the value "One Two". The notation of the first appearance of the key is beeing used. Multiple values are beeing separated by zero bytes as defined in the APEv2 specification.

Item values are not allowed to be empty.

Beta testing

The beta version has already gone through extensive testing performed by my automatic scripts. But i haven't performed a noteworthy amount of testing of the new tagging functionality under real world conditions. Please try the beta release and report any bugs in this thread.

I would also be happy about tests of compression efficiency and speed. Because the final release will have identical performance (there may be a speed variation of 1 to 2 percent because of different code alignment of another build), it does make sense to test the beta.

Thanks for testing and have fun

Thomas

Thank you very much for another great (beta) release!

I already love the tagging function
Do the Umlauts work?

Yes!

Anything which can be mapped to window's (locale) ansi char set should work.

I just tried new TAK 1.1.2 Beta with EAC v0.99pb5 and checked with foobar2000 v0.9.6.8 (with foo_input_tak.dll TAK Decoder 0.4.3 and tak_deco_lib.dll v.1.1.2).

I used in EAC external compression pointing to takc.exe and the following command line parameters:

All seems to work just fine, I intentionally used latin characters in track title, album title and artist name. In foobar2000 the properties of .tak file showed this:

The EAC created this .log file (I don't know how to make the box scrollable):

I noticed when that when the DOS Window pops up when takc.exe is launched after ripping, it just shows the temporarily filename (determined by EAC) and some dots to show the progress, i.e. no percentage or any other kind of number that could indicate a correct/succesfull compression was done.

Moderation: Replaced "quote" with "codebox".

I tried embedding cuesheet in the big .tak file (=album image created with EAC Copy Image & Create cuesheet) with foobar2000 through Utils >>Edit cuesheet but as it seems it doesn't get saved to the tak file. Embedding cuesheets isn't possible (yet)?

Cheers and thumbs up for Thomas!

Slightly faster decoding on my Athlon 83.9x vs 85.4x

Thanks, Thomas

This is a feature of foobar2000 respectively the foo_input_tak plugin. The TAK decoder library is not involved in this at all. Check the foobar2000 console, the cue sheet probably contains syntax errors.

I have played around a bit more with album image in TAK format. I add cuesheet loading it via Utils>>Edit cuesheet but as I said yesterday it doesn't get saved. Today I first tried manual editing of tags and this works (through Propertied dialogue), the embedded cuesheet is updated as well when foobar2000 calculates ReplayGain values or when I use tags retrieved from freedb.

So after this on purpose I manually changed some track titles, artist name and album title (through Properties dialogue). I checked via Edit Cuesheet that these changes were applied. Then I loaded again the original cuesheet and this resulted in a weird behaviour: track titles were updated in embedded cuesheet but not the album title nor artist name! I opened with Notepad the original cuesheet to be sure that this file wasn't modified and indeed it wasn't (album title and artist name were still correct). Manually editing through Properties dialogue was necessary to get have again correct album name and artist name.

All the time I couldn't see anything strange in the console, just these kind of information:


The cuesheet I use is generated by EAC Copy Image & Create Cuesheet. It is supposed to have correct syntax, right? This is its content:

i haven't encountered this problem with FLAC and this all is done on Windows 7 RC.

Moderation: Replaced "quote" with "codebox". Please learn how to do this for future posts.

Some more information. Please split off this part of thread because as one can read in the following this has nothing to do with TAK. Sorry for messing up this thread.

I ripped an other CD to TAK and the same problem ocurred so I ripped the same album to FLAC image to check. The same behaviour with FLAC showed up! At first I was surprised but then I realised the difference: I ripped album image to TAK and let EAC tag the file, but in past when I ripped album to one FLAC image I didn't let EAC tag the file at all (no tagging instructions in EAC external compressor commandline arguments). In the latter case embedding cuesheet never was a problem because album image had no tags.

So after this I used foobar2000's Remove Tags option and indeed, after doing so embedding a cuesheet was done correctly. I've spent some more time deleting individual tag entries (through Properties dialogue) and embedding the cuesheet afterwards. For now, I've come to the conclusion that foobar2000 displays native FLAC tags or TAK apev2 tags when present. If tag isn't present it is retrieved from cuesheet. Can someone confirm this? In foobar2000 is there indeed some kind of priority in reading and displaying tags?

Hi! I've just tested the new beta for decoding performance under foobar and I encountered a strange phenomenon.
For the first I tested its speed against the last (1.1.1) decoding library while playing another TAK in the meantime and found a huge leap in performance: 378x vs 298x... for a brief moment I was very happy about it, but that 298 looked like a great regression towards the first releases, I had remembered way-over-300 values... and a test run without background music showed me that the old library is capable of 369x speed on the same test material. I repeated the test a few times and concluded that 1.1.1 is indeed sensitive to another instance. Looks like a glitch in threading, I don't know if it's in foobar (0.9.6.7, sorry, I was too lazy to upgrade to the very last version) or on tak_deco_lib's side...
Anyway, it seems to be gone in 1.1.2 beta.
The results are:

1.1.1 w/ background music - 298x
1.1.2 w/ background music - 378x
1.1.1 w/o background music - 369x
1.1.2 w/o background music - 379x

(running on a Conroe C2D 6420@3.33GHz(8*416), 832MHz cl4 ddr2, offboard nVidia gfx, PCI x-fi fatal1ty)
And on the top of that it still has some performance improvement and is smaller. Keep up the good work!

Thank you!

Yes, i also like positive (non-bug) reports about the new feature. Has anyone tried to embed cuesheet files with the -tt command?


TAK will show the compression ratio when it is done. But probably you can't see this, because the window is beeing closed too fast.

Other applications can check TAK's exit code. It's 0 if anything went well.

If you want to know, if your specific application checks the exit code, you may add an invalid paramter to your command line to force TAK to return an error code.


Unexpected but nice!


Fine!

To be honest, i don't know what exactly has caused the performance drop in 1.1.1...

Im sure it has to do with the cpu's L1 (or maybe L2) cache utilization. Although i am caring a lot about optimal caching, there can be a lot of specific interaction with other applications, that is not easy to control.


Thank you!

Thomas

I used

and takc -fi showed

But how can I see the tag(s) content? Foobar2000 Properties dialogue is empty and says no embedded cuesheet is present, but this latter probably has something to do with the tak foobar component.

On the other hand: How can I tag an already compressed file?

Thank you for testing!


I don't think this would be the task of the compressor (would be some kind of "reinventing the wheel"). Better use a dedicated application like Mp3Tag or foobar (i hope, that cuesheet support can be implemented sooner or later).

I still would like to receive more feedback regarding the new tagging functionality. If more people can confirm, that it is working well, i may prepare the final release.

Thomas

Not much people replying It seems there's not much interest anymore in TAK?

Maybe it's because Thomas did such a good job of previous versions - there are too many content TAK users.

C.

Great stuff. Keep up the wonderful work with TAK.

finally tags by default?
honestly.. that was the reason which kept me from using TAK (didn't want to use this wapet thingy)
will start testing tomorrow

One step closer to 2.0.

Nice to see the new TAK version but let's look closer to it. First of all I have been quite interested with following phrase from the changelog:



So let's see how it looks on practise. In this and all the following tests I've used the Chick Corea - The Ultimate Adventure album being converted to one WAV file or its variant passed through LossyWAV beta 1.1.3e at default settings.
At one test another album have been used.
Timer v8.00 used for measurements and output file is redirected to another HDD to avoid impact from IO-system.


TAK v1.1.2 beta 1 at -p# -fsl512 -wm0


In both cases 4m preset produce the same sized output file as 3m but slower so more correctly will be to say:
It doesn't make sense to go higher than -p3m when compressing LossyWav-files... Anyway, thanks for tip
More interesting will be to see if previous issue with bad behaviour on some -fsl values is gone.
First of all the brief test on lossyWAV variant.



Unexpected results. v1.1.2 beta 1 still provides bad time rankings but somehow managed to provide best compression.
Here is another test table for lossless variant.



Still strange behaviour on -fsl values of 512 and 1024 regarding the time. Also strange behaviour on -fsl values of 4096 and 8192 regarding the size.
Hope it will help

I just concern about the decode performance's difference with FLAC in foobar2000.

Did it work for you?


That's true, but although i am regulary working on the optimized codec, i can't see a release date earlier than maybe the end of this year...


Thank you for testing!

My recommendation is based upon the average result of several quite heterogenous file sets. But surely there will be cases where higher presets are advantageous.


Looks good for me.


For me this is a non-issue because the -fsl does only make real sense in combination with LossyWav.


Oh yes!


Maybe this is for you:

While i was waiting for more testers of the new tagging funcionality (this seems to become the longest beta test of any TAK version...), i already worked on V 1.1.3. I have achieved speed improvements of up to 7 percent for both encoding and decoding!

And i have deceided to make those optimizations part of the 1.1.2 release. Therefore i intend to release a beta 2 within the next days.

Thomas

Are you thinking about releasing the encoder library too?
As I wrote in the official 1.1.1 release thread, I wrote two filters, for Audition and nero, obviously decoding only.
I hope you will consider about releasing the encoding library as soon as possible; is 1.1.2 beta2 too soon?

Well, here are some results for my Intel Pentium Dual Core 2 GHz and AMD Sempron 2,2 GHz. Speed improvements over V1.1.1 in percent:


Now i will prepare the beta 2 release.

edit: Updated according to the results of the Beta 2.

Oh yes, that's definitely too soon!

It involves design, coding, internal and external testing and a considerable update of the SDK documentation.

But i really appreciate your work! I will see, what i can do. No promises, because i don't know how much spare time will be left for TAK in the next months.

Thomas

Beta 2 released

You can download it from the first post.

Thomas

I'm sorry for late feedback.
As to the new tagging function, 3 differences between TAKC and WAPET are felt to be inconvenient.

1. Tagging multibyte characters
   
   TAKC adds unnecessary values.
   
   
   • Tested:
     Drag&drop a wav to a batch file like this:
     (Perhaps "chcp 932" or something is needed.)
     
     CODE
     path %path%;C:\Program Files\Tak\
     path %path%;C:\Program Files\wapet\
     cd /d "%~dp1"
     rem Copy^&Paste from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China
     Takc.exe -e -overwrite -tt "Title=中" "%~1" "%~n1-takc-c1.tak"
     Takc.exe -e -overwrite -tt "Title=中國" "%~1" "%~n1-takc-c2.tak"
     wapet.exe "%~n1-wapet-c1.tak" -t "Title=中" Takc.exe -e "%~1" "%~n1-wapet-c1.tak"
     wapet.exe "%~n1-wapet-c2.tak" -t "Title=中國" Takc.exe -e "%~1" "%~n1-wapet-c2.tak"
     rem Copy^&Paste from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan
     Takc.exe -e -overwrite -tt "Title=日" "%~1" "%~n1-takc-j1.tak"
     Takc.exe -e -overwrite -tt "Title=日本" "%~1" "%~n1-takc-j2.tak"
     wapet.exe "%~n1-wapet-j1.tak" -t "Title=日" Takc.exe -e "%~1" "%~n1-wapet-j1.tak"
     wapet.exe "%~n1-wapet-j2.tak" -t "Title=日本" Takc.exe -e "%~1" "%~n1-wapet-j2.tak"
     rem Copy^&Paste from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea
     Takc.exe -e -overwrite -tt "Title=한" "%~1" "%~n1-takc-k1.tak"
     Takc.exe -e -overwrite -tt "Title=한국" "%~1" "%~n1-takc-k2.tak"
     wapet.exe "%~n1-wapet-k1.tak" -t "Title=한" Takc.exe -e "%~1" "%~n1-wapet-k1.tak"
     wapet.exe "%~n1-wapet-k2.tak" -t "Title=한국" Takc.exe -e "%~1" "%~n1-wapet-k2.tak"
     Takc.exe -fi "%~n1-takc-j2.tak">"%~n1-takc-j2.txt"
     pause
   • Result:
     
     CODE
     === test-takc-j2.tak ==========================================
     
     File size: 32.77 MB
     Header size: 0.11 KB
     Unused: 0.00 KB
     Compression: 72.32 %
     Samples per channel: 11879952
     File duration: 269.39 sec
     Frame duration: 125 ms
     Seek table: Not available
     Audio format: PCM, 44100 Hz, 16 Bits, 2 Channels
     Encoder: V 1.1.2, -p2
     Wave file meta data: Header 44, Footer 0 Bytes
     MD5: Not available
     APEv2-Tag: Yes / 1 Items / 0.08 KB
     Status: Ok
     
     Though TAKC says test-takc-j2.tak is OK, Winamp shows its title to be "日本;;" and foobar2000 does as "日本; ". Mp3tag says it has 2 "TITLE" keys.
     
     
     
     I guess you feel reluctant to support foreign languages, though...
   
   
2. Embedding a cuesheet
   
   
   QUOTE (Alexxander @ Jun 24 2009, 18:43)
   Foobar2000 Properties dialogue is empty and says no embedded cuesheet is present, but this latter probably has something to do with the tak foobar component.
   Same here. TAKC adds unnecessary values.
   
   
   • Tested:
     Drag&drop a wav or a cue to a batch file like this:
     
     CODE
     path %path%;C:\Program Files\Tak\
     path %path%;C:\Program Files\wapet\
     cd /d "%~dp1"
     Takc.exe -e -overwrite -tt "Cuesheet=@%~n1.cue" "%~n1.wav" "%~n1-takc.tak"
     wapet.exe "%~n1-wapet.tak" -f "cuesheet=%~n1.cue" Takc.exe -e "%~n1.wav" "%~n1-wapet.tak"
     Takc.exe -fi "%~n1-takc.tak">"%~n1-takc.txt"
     pause
   • Result:
     
     CODE
     === WHAM! - LAST CHRISTMAS-takc.tak ===========================
     
     File size: 66.51 MB
     Header size: 0.11 KB
     Unused: 0.00 KB
     Compression: 58.93 %
     Samples per channel: 29582280
     File duration: 670.80 sec
     Frame duration: 125 ms
     Seek table: Not available
     Audio format: PCM, 44100 Hz, 16 Bits, 2 Channels
     Encoder: V 1.1.2, -p2
     Wave file meta data: Header 44, Footer 0 Bytes
     MD5: Not available
     APEv2-Tag: Yes / 1 Items / 0.64 KB
     Status: Ok
     
     Though TAKC says this TAK image is OK, foobar2000 says "Embedded Cuesheet : no". Mp3tag says it has 2 "CUESHEET" keys.
     
     
   
   
3. Tagging from a text file
   
   This is not a bug, but TAKC doesn't work if I edit the second batch file and change the cuesheet option from -tt "Cuesheet=@%~n1.cue" to -tt "Cuesheet=@%~dpn1.cue" or -tt "Cuesheet=@*.cue"

Environment:

Windows XP Home SP3 (Japanese)

TAK 1.1.2 Beta 2

wapet 0.6

Winamp 5.56

foobar2000 0.9.6.8

TAK Decoder 0.4.3

Mp3tag 2.43

Anyway, thanks for the nice software!

Thank you!


No! i really would like to implement it!

But it (true unicode support for the command line) is not easy... And unfortunately i don't know much about localization.

But i will try to learn a bit more.


Regarding foobar: it's indeed a plugin issue.

But i don't know what is going on with Mp3tag respectively Takc...


Since @ doesn't support wildcards, "Cuesheet=@*.cue" has to fail. But i don't know, why "Cuesheet=@%~dpn1.cue" does not work...

Again, thank you for your very detailed report!

Thomas

Glad to see there is progress. foobar's TAK decoding is 6-7% faster now for p0-p1 on E2160.
Now transcoding to lossy formats from TAK p0-p1 is only about <2% slower than from FLAC.

How to play tak files in WMP???

Decode them to WAV or reencode to something else (e.g. WMA Lossless).

Well any other option than that..?

To re-encode TAK files to WAV is just like you are murdering the format!!!

Aren't the developers, developing any plugins so that simple players like WMP support them, so that the format rises, coz I like this format and it's too close to flac in encoding and decoding time, and we need something like that, and yeah I know there's a plugin for Winamp that works for Mediamonkey to, but that doesn't cut it, to widespread the format, it's codec should be developed.

I use a codec pack like K-lite Media Codec Pack and everyone says that it supports every codec but it doesn't support TAK, and it is a free codec pack so I think the developers can ask them to embed TAK codec with their pack so that it gets bigger platform and portability.

Up to now TAK's closed source, so unless Tom develops anything for WMP himself you're outta luck, just ditch that awful player man.

Moderation: Removed unnecessary quotation of the previous post.

Sounds like useless off-topic discussion. How does WMP equal "widespread" when it works only on Windows, just like the other playback solutions?

Don't even get me started on, "If it's open source..." >:(

Yep, and thankfully we haven't seen the usual open source trolling (I think the previous zealots got the message last time around).

TAK 1.1.2 has been released. Some of you seem to want to continue an off-topic discussion, so I have closed this thread.