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Impressive results - on CD-quality audio too, not just speech as with many recent codecs. One thing I was not able to find, either in the blog post or the paper

Impressive results - on CD-quality audio too, not just speech as with many recent codecs. One thing I was not able to find, either in the blog post or the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.13438.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.13438.pdf), was the size of the model. EDIT: I downloaded the model from the code (https://github.com/facebookresearch/encodec/blob/3837f0db2a3b0fa00084cdd145cc6e8553048431/encodec/model.py#L259 https://github.com/facebookresearch/encodec/blob/3837f0db2a3...). It looks to have 15M parameters in total (this is a CPU-only model, by the way). For inference, I assume we can get away with 16-bit floats, so this clocks in at about 30 MiB. Not particularly favorable compared with LAME on my system (164 KiB), but not at all unreasonable to use - these days apps take 30 MiB dependencies all the time.

augustuspolius 4y ago
The phrasing they use is a bit confusing. "Speech" is not a clear quality description, so it's odd to compare speech to a CD quality recording (presumably 44.1 kHz). Speech can also be sampled at CD quality. If they meant to emphasize the difference in frequency range or dynamic range - there were, perhaps, better ways to do that (e.g. "telephone conversation" vs "symphonic orchestra recording").
- deleted 4y ago
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- bscphil 4y ago
  My best guess is that all they meant by "CD quality" was that it was targeting full band stereo replication, rather than narrow band as is typically used for speech. Not that it could achieve transparent compression at any particular bitrate. The tiny music clip in the sample, encoded at 6 kbps, is obviously not any kind of evidence for "CD quality" one way or the other. (The clip itself, if you download it from the page, is re-encoded with 64 kbps AAC.) No way to know how it would stack up against 96 kbps Opus on a stack of CDs with blind testing, I don't think.
password4321 4y ago
Yeah, I didn't quite get the "easy sharing" part... need the model for playback!

augustuspolius 4y ago

The phrasing they use is a bit confusing. "Speech" is not a clear quality description, so it's odd to compare speech to a CD quality recording (presumably 44.1 kHz). Speech can also be sampled at CD quality. If they meant to emphasize the difference in frequency range or dynamic range - there were, perhaps, better ways to do that (e.g. "telephone conversation" vs "symphonic orchestra recording").

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bscphil 4y ago
My best guess is that all they meant by "CD quality" was that it was targeting full band stereo replication, rather than narrow band as is typically used for speech. Not that it could achieve transparent compression at any particular bitrate. The tiny music clip in the sample, encoded at 6 kbps, is obviously not any kind of evidence for "CD quality" one way or the other. (The clip itself, if you download it from the page, is re-encoded with 64 kbps AAC.) No way to know how it would stack up against 96 kbps Opus on a stack of CDs with blind testing, I don't think.

password4321 4y ago

Yeah, I didn't quite get the "easy sharing" part... need the model for playback!