RKau was created by Malcolm Taylor to be a high performance lossless audio compressor, also offering a simple lossy encoding mode. It was developed together with RK (a general purpose data compressor) and RKim (a lossless image compressor).

It is an assymetrical compressor - meaning, it takes more resources to compress a file than to decompress it. Compressors that operate in a similar fashion are Monkey's Audio and FLAC.

Later Malcolm created MSoftware to sell an improved version of RK and RKau called WinRK, striving to provide the best compression performance among archivers, without regard for speed or memory consumption. The endeavour probably was not successful as it disappeared after a few years.

A mirror of the RKau web page is avaliable at the Internet Archive.

Compression performance in my limited test: 51,78% (-h setting)


Date: 2000-12-11
Version: 1.07
Interface: Command line + Winamp plugin
Platform: Win32
Download: rkau.zip - 42kB