Difference between revisions of "RK Audio"

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'''RK Audio''' ('''RKAU''') is a [[lossless]] (and [[lossy]]) audio compressor. It was developed by Mark Taylor together with RK (a general purpose data compressor) and RKim (a lossless image compressor).
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'''RK Audio''' ('''RKAU''') is a legacy [[lossless]] (and [[lossy]]) audio [[codec]] for the Windows platform. It was developed by Malcolm Taylor together with RK (a general purpose data compressor) and RKim (a lossless image compressor).  
  
At some point, some years ago, it featured the best compression levels among the lossless audio encoders. But then development halted and competitors like [[Monkey's Audio]], [[OptimFROG]] and [[Lossless Audio]] caught on.
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Development apparently ceased around year 2000; the author offered it for download until circa 2005 at his new company MSoftware, which then for a while revived the compression suite ([http://www.squeezechart.com/audio.html including an audio compressor]) as the WinRK archiver, now also discontinued.
  
It was closed source. Added to that, it was very slow on decoding and had few features. So, it never became a really popular format.
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Testing by ReallyRareWares and Squeezechart indicated excellent compression level by year 2000 standards, at the cost of high CPU usage. Features were few.  
  
Recently, RKsoft was revived by Mark Taylor, now with the name MSoftware, so there is hope RKAU development will start again.
 
  
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=== Further reading ===
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* [https://www.rarewares.org/rrw/rkau.php RKAU at ReallyRareWares]
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{{navbox audio codecs}}
  
 
[[Category:Codecs]]
 
[[Category:Codecs]]

Revision as of 13:21, 10 January 2022

RK Audio (RKAU) is a legacy lossless (and lossy) audio codec for the Windows platform. It was developed by Malcolm Taylor together with RK (a general purpose data compressor) and RKim (a lossless image compressor).

Development apparently ceased around year 2000; the author offered it for download until circa 2005 at his new company MSoftware, which then for a while revived the compression suite (including an audio compressor) as the WinRK archiver, now also discontinued.

Testing by ReallyRareWares and Squeezechart indicated excellent compression level by year 2000 standards, at the cost of high CPU usage. Features were few.


Further reading