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Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk
- mockery 8y agoNone of the audio samples play for me (In neither Chrome nor Edge... Other sites play just fine.) Makes it very hard to evaluate claims of codec quality, which seems like the primary purpose of the blog post. :(
- fuzzy2 8y agoWorks for me on my iPad.
- jimnotgym 8y agoWorking on Firefox Android
- S3raph 8y agoconfirm, works fine on latest Firefox stable Android
- 0x0 8y agoWorks in Chrome for macOS
- chapium 8y agoI have no problems in Chrome.
- sbierwagen 8y agoWorking on Chrome 67 on Win 10.
- yitchelle 8y agoThere is a option to download the audio for offline listening.
- codetrotter 8y agoWorks on iOS 11 for me but I had to press play and then wait a couple of seconds, press pause and then play again and wait another couple of seconds. Try that.
- makapuf 8y agoFine by me on Firefox/Linux.
- BenjiWiebe 8y agoEven works in the embedded browser of the "Materialistic" HN reader app, on Android 5.1.
- terramex 8y agoI confirm, doesn't work for me too. Neither in Safari 56 nor Chrome 67 (macOS 10.13).
- mmastrac 8y agoSeriously impressive and game-changing results, especially when you take Wavenet into account. I'm curious to see how Wavenet would perform w/Opus.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoOn a related note, I wish more (any!) podcasts were distributed in opus.
- iagooar 8y agoAll the +2k podcasts hosted on Podigee (a podcast hosting company mainly known in German-speaking countries) are distributed in opus. But it is, and probably will always be, a rather niche distribution format. AAC had its moment, but MP3 is alive and kicking. Even Apple acknowledges its importance by adding support for chapter markers in iOS12.
- zdw 8y agoThere are a lot of playback issues - VBR MP3 and older OS releases of both iOS and Android, never mind the car players and similar all contribute to the problem. The post-show of this podcast talks about these and other issues in detail - Marco is on both sides of the issue as a podcast producer and podcast app developer: http://atp.fm/episodes/182 http://atp.fm/episodes/182
- CharlesW 8y agoIf you're a podcaster, another benefit of AAC over MP3 is that VBR is not an issue.
- CharlesW 8y ago> AAC had its moment… That moment is 15 years in with no signs of losing steam[1]. AAC effectively replaced MP3 for most online audio use cases, with podcasting as a notable exception[2]. And of course, AAC is the audio format for all basically all online video distribution. [1] Apple kicked off the transition in 2003 with the introduction of AAC-based digital music sales. [2] Because podcasting is a decentralized medium, and the vast majority of podcasters don't know much (if anything) about media encoding.
- chungy 8y ago
- tommoor 8y agoMake sure you get to the end and listen to the WaveNet samples, amazing stuff.
- corruptio 8y agoHaving grown accustom to MP3 artifacts, it's strange to hear artifacts that are natural, but just aren't quite right. More specifically, in the male voice sample: "sold about seventy-seven", I received it as "sold about sethenty-seven".
- jakobegger 8y agoYes, and "certificates" sounds like "certiticates". Reminds me of a story about a copying machine that had a image compression algorithm for scans which changed some numbers on the scanned page to make the compressed image smaller. (Can't remember where I read about that, must have been a couple years ago on HN)
- raphlinus 8y agoIt's the lossy jbig2 compression in Xerox copiers: http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_... And yes, I think this is a relevant comparison. As the entropy model becomes more sophisticated, errors are more likely to be plausible texts with different meaning, and less likely to be degraded in ways that human processing can intuitively detect and compensate for.
- misnome 8y ago> t's the lossy jbig2 compression in Xerox copiers: http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_.. http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_.... My understanding of this fault was that it was a bug in their implementation of JBIG2, not the actual compression? Linked article seems to support this.
- raphlinus 8y agoI think it was just overly aggressive settings of compression parameters. I don't see any evidence that the jbig2 compressor was implemented incorrectly. Source: [1] [1]: https://www.xerox.com/assets/pdf/ScanningQAincludingAppendixA.pdf https://www.xerox.com/assets/pdf/ScanningQAincludingAppendix...
- Ambroos 8y agoThat is very impressive! I wonder if a WaveNet decoder could be built for phone calls, as those still sound awful. If it's possible to do this only on the decoder side you don't have to wait for your network to start supporting HD voice or VoLTE to get better quality audio!
- IshKebab 8y agoActually if you're lucky and make a phone call with HDVoice, or whatever they're calling it, the quality is excellent. It makes a huge difference. Unfortunately the place where you really want good quality is call centres - it's often hard to hear people and half of the reason is the shitty POTS quality - and call centres will probably get HDVoice in about 40-50 years. Maybe. Edit: nm should have read all of your comment before replying!
- reaperducer 8y ago>Actually if you're lucky and make a phone call with HDVoice, or whatever they're calling it, the quality is excellent Can confirm. I spend a lot of time in fringe reception areas, but every now and then I get a good, strong signal and the HD Voice kicks in between my iPhone and my wife's and it sounds like she's standing right next to me. It really is something to experience, especially if the previous phone call was over regular tech. Back when AT&T was running the "You get what you pay for" ads to combat SPRINT and MCI, it had a service you could sign up for that would give your landline phone calls amazing quality. Sadly, a majority of people would rather pay less for crap than more for quality; even back then.
- namibj 8y agoAlso why no one really appreciated ISDN over here in central Europe. Yes, there are ways to do better _now_, and it would have been trivial to support channels with better codecs by negotiating something different than u-law 8kHz PCM, but back then that resulted in rather good quality. The issue was that few people got ISDN phones, which resulted in them using analog outputs on an adapter device, which got later incorporated into the internet router, which at one point switched from ISDN to VoIP. And people plug a phone via an analog jacket into the router, instead of using a VoIP capable phone or even anything digital. While many do use DECT cordless phones, those rarely use the DECT hardware inside the router, and instead use the one in the charging dock, which itself connects via an analog, POTS-bandpass-filtered, phone jacket to the VoIP router. Oh well, we will probably never get that kind of quality, which is only possible with QoS on the whole path, if there is any congestion. That is the one thing something like rocket.chat and discord can't provide. Edit: the way to do this is to force quality upon people, wherever you won't drive them away with the cost this incurs. That way people will associate your brand as a whole with the quality, i.e., in that case, people will associate AT&T with quality, not AT&T premium. Normal people do not even know what kind of plan they are on, except for about one hour before and after they sign the contract.
- Apocryphon 8y ago"The man behind it, David Rowe, is an electronic engineer currently living in South Australia. He started the project in September 2009, with the main aim of improving low-cost radio communication for people living in remote areas of the world. With this in mind, he set out to develop a codec that would significantly reduce file sizes and the bandwidth required when streaming." What do you know, it's sort of like Pied Piper without the magical compression or cloud handwaving.
- LeonM 8y agoI've been reading David Rowe's blog [0] since 2008, there are some other really interesting projects and products on it. One of my favorites back then was his home build electric car. [0] https://www.rowetel.com/ https://www.rowetel.com/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cyounkins 8y agoTo anyone else confused, I think the statement refers to http://www.piedpiper.com/ http://www.piedpiper.com/ and not the folk legend.
- MrRadar 8y agoCodec2 is also fully open source and patent-free, in contrast to virtually every other ultra-low-bitrate voice codec (which are proprietary and have expensive patent licensing attached). He has a Patreon if you want to support him in the ongoing development of Codec2 and his SDR modems to enable use of it in amateur radio: https://www.patreon.com/drowe67 https://www.patreon.com/drowe67
- sp332 8y agoIs Speex also in that category?
- voxadam 8y agoSpeex has actually been superseded by Opus. Both are patent free as well.
- zouhair 8y agoOpus is patented[0] but just royalty-free patents. [0]: http://opus-codec.org/license/ http://opus-codec.org/license/
- MrRadar 8y agoSpeex and Opus bottom out around 6000-8000 bps. Codec2 starts at 3200 bps and goes down to 700 bps. The original target use for Codec2 is real-time transmission in the HF (shortwave) and VHF/UHF amateur radio bands where those are about as much as you can transmit within the same bandwidth as analog voice modes once you factor in error correction.
- gwern 8y agoCodec2 might be patent-free, but Codec2 with a WaveNet decoder isn't because WaveNet (convolutional neural networks for generating audio sequence data) is patented: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20180075343 https://patents.justia.com/patent/20180075343
- 8y ago
- dahauns 8y agoAside from the seriously impressive WaveNet based results, I think the article doesn't do the codec itself enough justice. I mean, low-bitrate speech codecs have been around for some time (hey, vocoders are the oldest kind of audio codecs in history!), and I grew skeptical when they started to compare with mp3 and opus. But looking at this page Codec2 really holds its own when compared to AMBE and especially MELP, two of the most prominent ultra low-bandwidth speech codecs used today: https://www.rowetel.com/?p=5520 https://www.rowetel.com/?p=5520
- gourneau 8y agoHere is a fascination video history of the vocoder. Complete with coverage of the early room size machines. https://video.newyorker.com/watch/object-of-interest-the-vocoder https://video.newyorker.com/watch/object-of-interest-the-voc...
- gigatexal 8y agoBut this guy a beer. What a feat!
- mwcampbell 8y agoThe WaveNet demos are indeed impressive. But I wonder if the WaveNet decoder needed to be trained for those specific voices.
- sbr464 8y agoI've become almost entranced with the concept of comparing things to the size of a Floppy Disk. I'm actually planning to get a tattoo of one on my right forearm. I've been working on a large business management platform for the last couple of years and noticed that after investing $500k (salaries/etc) and building a huge amount of functionality, the frontend and backend codebases are still under 1.5mb. Pretty amazing.
- calabin 8y agoI actually got a floppy disk tattoo on my foot in a moment of spontaneity (bottomless mimosas). https://imgur.com/a/slCG519 https://imgur.com/a/slCG519
- sbr464 8y agonice haha
- p1mrx 8y agoWhen we had a 486 running Windows 95, I used to convert CDs to WAV for fun. The GSM 6.10 codec in Sound Recorder (22050 Hz, Mono, 4 KB/s) could fit about 1 song onto a floppy.
- scruffyherder 8y agoWith Real Audio, you could fit one side of a LP onto a floppy diskette https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/04/20/getting-first-side-dark-side-moon-onto-floppy-diskette/ https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/04/20/getting-first-... Of course sound quality is lacking, but it was really cool at the time, but the amount of of time and resources needed was insane for the time.
- childintime 8y agoEverything spoken in a whole life could fit on a 128GB pendrive (assuming 5% talk time). Astounding.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoBlack Mirror is now technically possible.
- jancsika 8y agoWould be a fun experiment to use something like 3 or even 1 sine to get unintelligible speech, but then pair it with subtitles where each syllable of the text is animated synchronized with the speech. (Like the "follow the bouncing ball" song lyric animations.) By pairing the audio with the text, you would almost certainly convince the listener that they can understand it. Edit: typo
- bmdavi3 8y agoOr what if you scrunched the audio down to a bandwidth beyond what was still intelligible, but still captured some semblance of the speaker's voice. Use the original audio to compute subtitles and store them alongside the audio. That's your file. Then the player uses both as inputs to ai (some hand waving), which now has enough to put the pieces together and produce something intelligible again, in the speaker's voice.
- gruturo 8y agoBasically turn the speaker’s voice into a “font”, and then render text with it. Pretty sure it’s been done. Large initial delay while you get the whole font download, then basically just the text to be rendered and the occasional hint to the renderer
- rspeer 8y agoWithout the "intelligible" part, this makes me think of what the game Celeste does to give its characters voices without voice acting. They make voice-like synth sounds, different for each character, that are about the length of the text they're saying. It adds prosody and intonation to the text-based dialogue of the game. https://youtu.be/TZpQH8kSWNU?t=2m50s https://youtu.be/TZpQH8kSWNU?t=2m50s
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- andai 8y agoThis is how I imagine an intelligent car would sound if it figured out how to produce speech through the antigravity engine. Edit: oh sweet there's intonation too. Were these all made manually?
- WhiteNoiz3 8y agoThe Wavenet stuff sounds great, but I'm curious how big the model is. The audio files may be tiny, but you may need a huge neural network to decode them.
- bitwize 8y agoThe plain Codec2 decoder sounds like a TI-99/4A (and works on somewhat similar principles). If I hook a TI-99/4A to the WaveNet decoder, will it sound natural?
- danschumann 8y ago"Enhance" - said every movie guy ever.
- mr_donk 8y agoThis is amazing! With this codec and enough processing power, you could do this bidirectionally and have enough bandwidth to stream a two way realtime voice chat using 2400bps modems over a standard analog phone line!!! ... Oh... Wait a minute...
- hatsunearu 8y agoSide note: I'm still waiting for an open source, cheap way to do FreeDV/Codec2 on VHF either with a dongle that goes between a raspi/SBC or a laptop and a cheap ass radio like a baofeng, or an inexpensive radio with Codec2 support.
- baobrien 8y agoI think 2400B support is coming to the FreeDV GUI soon. I've seen some work done on that. That'll let you use a cheap FM radio and a laptop to get on the air with something codec2 based. I'm slowly chipping away at a TDMA mode for SDRs, but that's still probably a ways off.
- dredmorbius 8y agoI read, and listemn, to this, and am impressed. Then I think of the possible negative applications. a noation of 100m people, talking an hour per day on phone or other audio channel, could be stored on 100m * 365 * 1.5 MB of storage annually: 54 PB. In raw storage, that's less than $2 million. Far below national actor budgets.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y agoThe article failed to mention the original reason why Codec2 is invented. In digital amateur radio communication, currently the most widely-used codec is AMBE. But AMBE is a proprietary codec, covered by patents, unhackable - the counter-thesis of amateur radio. Codec2 was born to bring freedom to digital amateur radio communication, and technically even better than AMBE.
- smooc 8y agoIkzmjzn nsh
- codedokode 8y agoI noticed that when you listen to compressed audio first you hear the unnaturality of voice and clicks (probably when one frame's ending doesn't match next frame start). But in a few seconds you adapt to it and now voice sounds pretty clear. It is impressive how far one can compress speech.
- ksec 8y agoLet say we have Codec2 with WaveNet, its 3.2Kbps now does similar to may be 16Kbps EVS. ( EVS being the codec used in VoLTE, which is slightly better then even Opus in Speeches. ) What "value" / "uses" does this bring us? It cant be used in podcast because as shown it isn't very good with Music. And many podcast has Music in it. While Codec 2 with WaveNet can have a 2-4x reduction in bitrate. I cant think of a application that benefits from this immediately. The other thing I keep having in my mind is convolutional neural networks on Codec in general, Music, Movies, etc. What sort of benefits it bring us.
- perlgeek 8y ago> What "value" / "uses" does this bring us? Maybe not too much for "us" with LTE and 128GB storage on our phones, but in cases of low bandwith (think digital police radio), or when you have low storage availability, that's really awesome.
- krab 8y agoIf you'd be recording a huge number of phone calls, such size reduction might bring significant savings.
- madengr 8y agoWould be interesting to combine this Codec2 with LoRa modulation. Of course the latter is patented, but it combines both chirped and direct sequence spread spectrum to yield some very resilient modulation.
- samps 8y ago> However, where it starts to get more interesting is the work done by W. Bastiaan Kleijn from Cornell University Library. The authors are not from Cornell. I think the author made this mistake because the paper is posted on arXiv, and that’s what’s it says at the top of every page?