Meta’s AI-powered audio codec promises 10x compression over MP3

guest · Nov 8, 2022

Technique could allow high-quality calls and music on low-quality connections.
By Benj Edwards @benjedwards - November 1, 2022

Last week, Meta announced an AI-powered audio compression method called "EnCodec" that can reportedly compress audio 10 times smaller than the MP3 format at 64kbps with no loss in quality. Meta says this technique could dramatically improve the sound quality of speech on low-bandwidth connections, such as phone calls in areas with spotty service. The technique also works for music.

Meta debuted the technology on October 25 in a paper titled "High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression," authored by Meta AI researchers Alexandre Défossez, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Yossi Adi. Meta also summarized the research on its blog devoted to EnCodec.
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Beyond that, maybe we'll also get really small music audio files out of it someday. For now, Meta's new tech remains in the research phase, but it points toward a future where high-quality audio can use less bandwidth, which would be great news for mobile broadband providers with overburdened networks from streaming media.
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arXiv: High Fidelity Neural Audio Compression

We introduce a state-of-the-art real-time, high-fidelity, audio codec leveraging neural networks. It consists in a streaming encoder-decoder architecture with quantized latent space trained in an end-to-end fashion. We simplify and speed-up the training by using a single multiscale spectrogram adversary that efficiently reduces artifacts and produce high-quality samples.
[...]
Our approach is superior to the baselines methods across all evaluated settings, considering both 24 kHz monophonic and 48 kHz stereophonic audio. Code and models are available at this http URL.
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PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.13438

Meta: Using AI to compress audio files for quick and easy sharing

Today, we are detailing progress that our Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team has made in the area of AI-powered hypercompression of audio. Imagine listening to a friend’s audio message in an area with low connectivity and not having it stall or glitch. Our research shows how we can use AI to help us achieve this.
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Meta’s AI-powered audio codec promises 10x compression over MP3

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