TAC (Transparent Audio Codec) was developed by K+K Research, which comprised two developers: Kevin Anderson (KA) and Karsten Madsen (KM).

This codec became quite famous because of incessant praising by KM on several web forums 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, back then the golden standards), best quality at a wide range of bitrates, support and interest from the recording and gaming industries...

He also announced an AAC encoder (MP01) that supposedly had better quality than Fraunhofer's reference implementation. Alas, no one has ever seen it in action.

Eventually KM lost credibility at several forums and disappeared from the scene. Soon afterwards KA (who was the actual programmer) gave up developing the format.

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

You can see a mirror of the web site at the Internet Archive.


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

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