[gavinbirss]

Has anyone tried Transparent Audio Compression ( TAC ) from K+K research.

I have only tried the demo wich compressed your source to TAC and then uncompressed that to a WAV file so that you can evaluate the result. (Quality)

It seems to do some filtering above 20 Khz (sharp roll-off) before compression.

 

[tktran]

What compression ratio does that algorithm achieve?

Have you had a look into Monkey Audio? Reduces .WAV to ~50%, is VERY fast, and is a lossless compressor.

 

[jhoelter]

Quote:

What compression ratio does that algorithm achieve? Have you had a look into Monkey Audio? Reduces .WAV to ~50%, is VERY fast, and is a lossless compressor.

While Monkey's Audio does exactly what you've stated above, it also is Windows-only and closed-source.

A better alternative, in my opinion, is FLAC:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/

It's lossless, cross-platform, open-source, and can handle any type of WAV files, including 16-bit/44.1, 16/48, 24/96, etc... It also has built in file checksums, and already has plugins for music players including WinAmp and XMMS.

Whatever compressor you use, lossless is where it's at.

Jeff

 

[tktran]

Yes I'm sorry I forgot that Monkey's Audio was Windows only.
Perfectly understandable when you've only got a lone programmer working on it.

So if you're using Windows I think that Monkey's Audio is a better choice.

In terms of compression ratio, it outperforms FLAC by a small amount, but it's real strength is it's speed, consistently almost twice as fast.

FLAC will be great and it will be interesting to see how it develops.

But that doesn't take anything away from Monkey Audio's sheer speed (without sacrificing compression ratios)

(Also supports 8, 16 and 24 bit WAV's, mono/stereo, every samplerate, verify function, WinAMP, MMJukebox plugins)