This is not by any means a neutral test, it is the least-FLACable piece of music from my collection, and it is the least flattering for TAK that I have ever come across (it is WavPack-friendly as long as time is no object ...). Consider it a worst-case test.
Music is Merzbow: I lead you towards glorous times, track 3 from Venereology (1994). For a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTRZdFqAOGA
Hardware: an old p4 3.06 with spinning hard drive.
tak.exe (GUI) used. No tweaking of options used except standard presets. No firm procedure for repeating, this is not meant to be taken as hard science, but the decoding tests were repeated because they surprised me.
Encoding using “test” (as I guessed writing is the bottleneck, definitely looks to be the case) and “compress”, p3 p3e p3m omitted because I'm lazy, but they all fail to break the 100% threshold.
p0 : test=219x encode=131x, size=100.96%
p0e: test=153x encode=89x, size=100.94%
p0m: test=86x encode=69x, size=100.50%
p1 : test=159x encode=83x, size=100.51%
p1e: test=92x encode=69x, size=100.52%
p1m: test=60x encode=52x, size=100.27%
p2 : test=113x encode=79x, size=100.30%
p2e: test=62x encode=51x, size=100.29%
p2m: test=34x encode=31x, size=100.15%
p4: test=38x encode=36x size=99.92%
p4e: test=31x encode=29x, size=100.04%
p4m: test=17x encode=17x, size=100.04%
For comparison:
FLAC-8 encoding to file: about 20x, size=98.8%.
Decoding using “test”. This result was so surprising that I repeated the experiment a few times – these are representative figures.
Glorious Times-p0.tak 170* Ok
Glorious Times-p0e.tak 134* Ok
Glorious Times-p0m.tak 165* Ok
Glorious Times-p1.tak 92* Ok
Glorious Times-p1e.tak 147* Ok
Glorious Times-p1m.tak 168* Ok
Glorious Times-p2.tak 121* Ok
Glorious Times-p2e.tak 140* Ok
Glorious Times-p2m.tak 177* Ok
Glorious Times-p4.tak 180* Ok
Glorious Times-p4e.tak 173* Ok
Glorious Times-p4m.tak 141* Ok
Duration: 27.26 sec
Speed: 145.17 * real time
Surprise – the higher compressed decode faster!? Would have made sense if there were large differences in file size which had to be read from drive, but these are virtually identical in size. This experiment was repeated due to the surprising result.
Decoding using “decompress”, writing to file; repeated due to the previous result being such a surprise. Somehow I don't get very consistent results here, but this is not way off:
Glorious Times-p0.tak 83* Ok
Glorious Times-p0e.tak 69* Ok
Glorious Times-p0m.tak 70* Ok
Glorious Times-p1.tak 58* Ok
Glorious Times-p1e.tak 77* Ok
Glorious Times-p1m.tak 58* Ok
Glorious Times-p2.tak 64* Ok
Glorious Times-p2e.tak 73* Ok
Glorious Times-p2m.tak 58* Ok
Glorious Times-p4.tak 48* Ok
Glorious Times-p4e.tak 72* Ok
Glorious Times-p4m.tak 60* Ok
Duration: 61.42 sec
Speed: 64.44 * real time
Seems obvious that speed is way beyond spinning drives.