Taxstar organizes all of your Australian and US tax-related information throughout the year. Simply enter the details from your documentation and store the documents. At tax time send the Taxstar tax report to your tax agent or accountant. Taxstar supports Australian and US taxpayers to organise their tax-related information during the year and then to provide a standardised, consolidated report of the data to the tax accountant or return preparer at tax time. US support covers most of the important elements but is not 100% coverage. Feedback is encouraged via the Taxstar web site to let us know where we need to add further support. Note the quoted cost of $11(US) is slightly overstated, depending on the current exchange rate between the US and Australian dollar. Cost is $10(Australian).

What is new in this release:

Initial support for US taxpayers. Will be fleshed out further in later releases. Some minor UI updates as we move towards multiple platform support.

Requirements:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, Windows XP 64-bit, PDF reader for report

Limitations:

60-day trial, limited functionality (minor restrictions)

If you are reading this you already know that DSD files (DSF and/or DFF) have rather big sizes and large collections of these require plenty disk space. Although the cost of HDDs is relatively low, it can be a problem for some people like those who want to migrate to expensive in terms of GB/$ SSD disks, those who use laptops and don’t want to carry additional external drives or those who can’t afford additional or higher capacity HDDs.

Lossless compression of PCM files with FLAC, ALAC or WavPack has been abailable for quite long but until now, the only possible way to reduce the DSD files’ footprint was using Philips’ DST software to compress DFF files. The problem with this method is that; the software is “Pro” use focused and unavailable to most users, needs very powerful processors both for compressing and for playing back and also the resulting DFF files have very poor tagging capabilities compared to DSF or other formats like FLAC, MP3, etc.

The latest Wavpack version 5.x changes this situation making it now possible to losslessly compress (ie. the compression is reversible without any loss) DSF and DFF files for free by up to 60% depending on source file and compression rate used.  The resulting .wv file will play as  24/352 PCM in any Wavpack compliant media players and as “native” DSD in Foobar with SACD plugin 1.04 or later or MPD (Music Player Daemon.