TAK Alternatives

TAK

»TAK – [T]om’s lossless [a]udio [k]ompressor / [T]oms verlustfreier [A]udio[k]ompressor – is, as the name already suggests, a lossless audio compressor, similar to FLAC, WavPack and Monkey’s Audio. On average, lossless compression reduces the file size to about 50 percent of the original size; however the compression can vary between approximately 30 and 70 percent, depending on the file. Decompression restores a bit identical copy of the original audio data (that's why we call it lossless).

My goal was to develop a compressor which combines good compression with optimal decoding speeds. On average, the current implementation should match the compression efficiency of Monkey's Audio High, while achieving decompression speeds similar to FLAC.« (Quote of Thomas Becker from TAK’s readme)

The compression is slightly better and the fault tollerance is on the same level compared with FLAC.

Audioplayers with TAK support are:
– Foobar2000
– Winamp
– Quintessential Player
– XMplay

Other applications with TAK support are:
– Exact Audio Copy (EAC)
– MP3tag
– shnTool

The author’s application’s page is in german: http://www.thbeck.de/Tak/Tak.html
For english informations you can visit this page: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=TAK
or this page: http://www.hqshare.net/showthread.php?t=25339
The last two pages also contains tutorials for EAC and foobar, even with presets examples.

Official comparison of TAK, FLAC and other lossless codecs on FLAC’s page: http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html
Another comparisons are by Synthetic Soul: http://synthetic-soul.co.uk/comparison/lossless/
or at Squeeze Chart: http://www.squeezechart.com/audio.html
[all comparisons are outdated since TAK has a new (final) version]

Plugin for Foobar2000: http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_input_tak
Plugin for Winamp and XMplay: http://www.thbeck.de/Tak/Tak.html#Links_TAK
Plugin for Quintessential Player: http://www.quinnware.com/list_plugins.php?type=input