TAK Winamp Plugin
A Winamp playback plugin for files created by TAK ((T)om's lossless (A)udio
(K)ompressor).
Version: IN_TAK.DLL V2.2.0 / 2011-07-10
Copyright 2006 by Thomas Becker, D-49080 Osnabrück.
All rights reserved.
License
This software is provided as FREEWARE, but only for private, non-commercial use.
It's also free for educational and scientific use and for use in charity and
humanitarian organisations.
Disclaimer of warranty
The software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. To the maximum
extent permitted by applicable law, the author further disclaims all warranties,
including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness
for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. The entire risk arising out of
the use or performance of the product and documentation remains with recipient.
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall the author
be liable for any consequential, incidental, direct, indirect, special,
punitive, or other damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages
for loss of business profits, business interruption, loss of business
information, or other pecuniary loss) arising out of this agreement or the use
of or inability to use the product, even if the author has been advised of
the possibility of such damages.
Distribution
The Software may be freely distributed provided that it is not modified and the
original archive remains intact with all accompanying files, and provided that
no fee is charged (except for any reasonable fees necessary to cover costs of
distribution media).
Contact
I am frequently active in the Lossless Audio Compression forum at
Hydrogen Audio;
a good place to ask questions regarding TAK.
My homepage, www.thbeck.de,
contains some information about TAK, but unfortunately only in german.
If you would like to contact me by email please be aware that i will not
always have time to answer.
Installation
- Close Winamp (if running).
- Copy the file "in_tak.dll" into the Plugins folder of your
Winamp installation.
- Start Winamp, open it's configuration dialog and associate the file
extension "tak" with Winamp.
Features
- Very low cpu usage. Depending on the encoder preset my Pentium 3 with
866 MHz decodes at a rate of 60 to 80 times faster than real time...
- Ultra fast seeking. I am not able to notice any delay on my old Pentium 3
with 866 MHz.
- Maximum error tolerance. It should be possible to playback any file
containing at least one intact block of about 2 seconds of audio data.
- Reading support for APEv2-tags located at the end of the file.
- Gapless playback.
Some remarks:
- Seeking in damaged files will not always be possible.
- Any damaged part of the audio data will be muted (replaced with silence).
If only the last 2 seconds of an 60 minutes file are intact, the plugin
will first output 3598 seconds of silence. If you want to remove damaged
audio parts, decode the file with the TAK application and selcet the
option "Skip errors".
- I tested the plugin with Winamp 2.91, 5.34 and 5.5. When using v 5.34
and higher with the default skin, seeking seemed to be delayed. Most
probably this only regards to the position indicator, the playback
seems to start immediately. After switching to the classic skin, any
delay was gone.
- Because of my very old sound card, i could not test 24-bit playback.
Futhermore: Some visualization plugins don't support 24-bit data. It has
to be converted to 16 bit before sending it to those plugins. This has
not been implemented yet! It's very easy to do, but i don't want to
include code, which i am not able to test. I will soon buy a better
soundcard.
History
V2.2.0 / 11-07-10
New features:
- Support for multi-channel audio.
V2.1.0 / 11-01-08
Modifications:
- The file info dialog now also shows the name of the codec used to
compress the file.
V2.0.0 / 10-01-07
New features:
- Support for the new codec introduced with TAK 2.0.
V1.1.2 / 9-07-27
Improvements:
- Faster decoding and a smaller binary because of the optimizations in
TAK 1.1.2.
V1.1.1 / 9-03-11
Modifications:
- This version will no longer use seek tables contained in files created
with applications prior to TAK 1.1.1.
Improvements:
- Smaller binary because of the optimizations in TAK 1.1.1.
V1.1.0 / 9-01-04
New Features:
- Support for 192 Khz Audio.
- Seeking without seek table.
Improvements:
- Faster decoding because of the optimizations in TAK 1.1.0.
V1.0.8 / 8-03-11
Modifications:
- Faster decoding because of the optimizations in TAK 1.0.4.
V1.0.7 / 7-12-14
Modifications:
- The decoder had to be modified to guarantee error robustness (decoding
through errors) for files created by pipe encoding with the -ihs
(ignore header size) switch applied.
- The info dialog displays the seek point interval.
V1.0.6 / 7-11-12
Bug fixes:
- Some compatibility issues with Winamp 5.5 resolved: "If I have
any tak file queued in the playlist when I quit winamp, the next time I
try to start winamp it instantly crashes. The only way for me to start
winamp again is to delete the local playlist files from winamp's
directory."
V1.0.5 / 7-11-05
New features:
- Support for frame sizes of 512, 1024 and 2048 samples which have been
introduced with TAK V1.0.2.
- Support for the additional preset INSANE introduced with TAK V1.0.2.
Bug fixes:
- The decoder is expected to process any (damaged) data without any
problems. But i have found and corrected two cases, where the decoder
could crash. The chance for this was less than 1 : 1000 (for damaged
files only!).
- In one place i used an invalid flag combination in a call of Windows'
VirtualFree().
V1.0.4 / 7-05-14
Bug fixes:
- When using the in_zip plugin, Winamp crashed.
V1.0.3
Non-public version for selected testers.
V1.0.2 / 7-04-14
Modifications:
- The APEv2 tag reading functions are a bit more tolerant when reading
invalid tag headers not following the official APEv2 specification.
Bug fixes:
- When playing high resolution audio, the plugin reported wrong values for
the current compressed bitrate.
V1.0.1 / 7-04-10
First stable release.
New features (compared to beta 3):
- Support for gapless playback.