TAC (Transparent Audio Codec) was developed at K+K research, that comprised two developers: Kevin Anderson (KA) and Karsten Madsen (KM).

This codec became quite famous due to incessant praising about it by KM at several web boards and web pages (one of the most famous is mirrored here. Another one is here. And a third one is here). Among his claims, KM said TAC was better than any codec ever developed (even the FhG AAC encoders), best quality at a wide range of bitrates, support and interest from the recoding and gaming industry...

He also announced an AAC encoder (MP01) that supposedly had better quality than FhG's reference implementation. Still, noone has ever seen it in action.

At some point KM was exposed as a liar at the VQF.com forum and disappeared from the scene. Soon after KA (that was the real developer) gave up developing the format.

In this page are featured two demo encoders with respective frontends. No player is available.

The official web site is available here.


Date: 1999-11-25
Version: 04 demo
Interface: Command Line + Frontend
Platform: Win32
Download: tacdemo4.zip - 78Kb

Date: 2000-11-07
Version: 05 demo
Interface: Command Line + Frontend
Platform: Win32
Download: tacdemo5.zip - 109Kb