HALAC 0.6.1 User Reviews

HALAC's multithread feature has been mentioned many times. Yes, HALAC offers very strong multithread support. However, single core performance is already very good by far. So the speed does not come only from multithread.

Starting from version 0.3.x, HALAC uses RICE encoding instead of ANS. In addition, compression ratios seem to be much better than before, depending on the processing speed. And it has a lot of advantages over the FLAC format.

Since it is currently actively developing, updated APIs and dlls have not been presented yet.

Multithreading in lossless audio codecs truly came to the forefront with HALAC. Afterwards, other codecs tried to add this feature. Also, FLAC cannot perform multithread decoding. Neither can TAK.

Monkeys Audio's 32-bit compression results are very poor. FLAC doesn't support 32-bit. HALAC's 32-bit results are almost the same as WAVPACK, but according to the results, it encodes about 10 times faster. Optimfrog compresses slightly better but is 20 times slower.

In the latest versions of HALAC, in "normal" mode, it easily surpasses even FLAC-5 in compression ratio. The new "plus" mode's compression ratio is close to FLAC-8, but it's 5 times faster.

I don't know if these are good or bad.

It's amazing how fast it works and how well it compresses. It could be the new, modern successor to the FLAC format.
The source code for the first version is available on GitHub.

It's a very interesting and successful codec. I don't think it has received enough attention. Or perhaps most people are not yet aware of this work.