I wanted to compare the weakest, the default and strongest compression of latest FLAC (v1.2.1) and TAK (v1.2.0). I was interested in compression rate but measured also global encoding time using timer.exe. Encoding was done through commandline on one CPU core.
Total playtime: 20:23:05,507 (20 hours and 23 minutes)
Number of tracks: 245
Original size: 12.945.214.156 Bytes (12,0 GB)
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3,0 GHz with WinXP SP2
WAV's are Source is on 2 disks in RAID0 (striping)
CompressedEncoded and decoded files are written to an other standalone drive
Encoding Process Decoding
Compressed Compression PT PRate GT GRate PT PRate GT GRate
flac1.2.1 -0 8.801.938.201 67,99% 233 315x 383 192x 180 409x 234 314x
flac1.2.1 -5 8.113.749.200 62,68% 453 162x 584 126x 194 379x 257 285x
flac1.2.1 -8 8.071.892.842 62,35% 1596 46x 1668 44x 204 359x 262 280x
TAKp0 8.031.153.454 62,04% 262 280x 408 180x 251 293x 290 253x
TAKp2 7.821.652.842 60,42% 397 185x 542 135x 285 257x 311 236x
TAKp5m 7.722.405.330 59,65% 3097 24x 3149 23x 347 212x 380 193x
PT=Process Time in seconds
PRate=Process Rate
GT=Global Time in seconds
GRate=Global Rate
Curious to see that in this case weakest TAK compression level compresses slightly more than FLAC's highest compression. The TAK default level compression is impressive considering encoding speed and resulting compression ratio.
I noticed that when compressing at the weakest level (FLAC -0 and TAK -p0) the CPU core usage was between 50 and 70% and not 100% as with the other levels. I suppose this is because CPU encodes faster than input data arrives.
Added 10th of November:
I added the Process Time and the corresponding rate. The Process Time gives better insight in real CPU usage than the Global Time but the latter represents how long the conversion process really took.
I also added the Decoding results (source and destination on different hard disks). The decoding speed of FLAC -8 (best compression) is better than TAK -p0 (weakest compression). As well as in the encoding process I think for decoding TAK -p2 (=default) is also the sweet spot.