Meta (Facebook owner) announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10x smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. Meta says this technique could dramatically improve the sound quality of music and speech on low-bandwidth connections, such as phone calls in areas with spotty service.
Meta describes its method as a three-part system trained to compress audio to a desired target size. First, the encoder transforms uncompressed data into a lower frame rate latent space representation. The quantiser then compresses the representation to the target size while keeping track of the most important information that will later be used to rebuild the original signal. This compressed signal is what gets sent through a network or saved to disk. Finally, the decoder turns the compressed data back into audio in real time using a neural network on a single CPU.
Their post is here and the paper here.
I assume this will be important for developing markets and rural USA (I couldn’t resist the tease) but not for the developed countries where fibre with Giga speeds will soon reach saturation levels. In the UK almost all new builds have fibre.
Meta describes its method as a three-part system trained to compress audio to a desired target size. First, the encoder transforms uncompressed data into a lower frame rate latent space representation. The quantiser then compresses the representation to the target size while keeping track of the most important information that will later be used to rebuild the original signal. This compressed signal is what gets sent through a network or saved to disk. Finally, the decoder turns the compressed data back into audio in real time using a neural network on a single CPU.
Their post is here and the paper here.
I assume this will be important for developing markets and rural USA (I couldn’t resist the tease) but not for the developed countries where fibre with Giga speeds will soon reach saturation levels. In the UK almost all new builds have fibre.