TAK Winamp Plugin

A Winamp playback plugin for files created by TAK ((T)om's lossless (A)udio (K)ompressor).

Version: IN_TAK.DLL 1.0.4, 2007-05-14

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

This version of the input plugin is based upon the new decoder, which is part of the upcoming TAK SDK. It's error tolerance (when decoding damaged files) should be even better than that of the decoder in TAK 1.0 final. 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:

• Limitations for seeking in damaged files: Currently the seektable has to be intact and no data should have been inserted into or removed from the audio part. Otherwise only sequential playback will 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 and 5.34. When using v 5.34 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

V1.0.1 / 7-04-10

First stable release.

New features (compared to beta 3):

• Support for gapless playback.

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.

V1.0.3

Non-public version for selected testers.

V1.0.4 / 7-05-14

Bug fixes:

• When using the in_zip plugin, Winamp crashed.