Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

auphonic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 137 posts

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#71

Post by gsich »

namibj wrote: post #67
gsich wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also why no one really appreciated ISDN over here in central Europe. Except Germany. Which had probably the best telephone system in the world when they deployed ISDN nationwide.

I am speaking as a German. Sure, larger businesses used proper ISDN, but your uncle/mom didn't. The best you could hope for there was only DECT compression, aka ADPCM 4bit/8kHz.

Sure they did. Adoption rate was about 30%, possibly even higher at it's peak.

DECT codec is useless if it's transmitted through analog lines, as it gets converted to standard 3.4k-Hz quality anyway. Except for in-house calls of course.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#73

Post by gsich »

namibj wrote: post #65
gsich wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The bug was when using the "Scan to PDF" function. It happened on all quality settings. Copying (scanning+printing in one step, no PDF) was not effected.

I remember differently, but I don't want to pull up the source right now. I did check some of the sources, but was not able to find the one I remember which had statistics on it. The xerox FAQ to it does lead me to consider that I might be confusing this with some other incident though, as they claim that Scanning is the only thing that is affected.

https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6558_-_de_-_saal_g_-_201412282...

I'd believe him more then any other source.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#74

Post by userbinator »

corruptio wrote: post #9

Having 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 se th enty-seven".

I found the artifacts odd too. It sounds like the guy speaking has gotten a bad cold or allergy and has stuffed sinuses.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#75

Post by apricot »

corruptio wrote: post #9

Having 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 se th enty-seven".

I thought the same thing. Compression artifacts that don't sound like compression artifacts, could lead to hard-to-detect mistakes.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#76

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

andai wrote: post #70
Hello71 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt there are any devices that are capable of accessing the modern web, with all its JavaScript bloat, yet cannot decode a simple audio codec. Even when Apple was installing AAC hardware decoders, they were already almost obsolete by modern embedded CPU development (especially the rise of medium-power ARM SoCs). I highly doubt any devices released in the past 5 years have any sort of fixed-function audio d…

I use Opus on my phone all the time. I was in a place where internet was really expensive, so I'd download and convert things on a Linux server. In conjunction with youtube-dl I could listen to pretty much anything I wanted, using almost no data. These days I use it mostly for audiobooks, if storage is limited.

Opus is awesome for audiobooks at 24kbps (probably one could go lower than this even) and music at 96kbps. I don't hear any difference in quality. It makes a big difference for my mobile which is limited to 128Gb.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#77

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

geofft wrote: post #8
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #5

On a related note, I wish more (any!) podcasts were distributed in opus.

As far as I know, enough podcast apps require MP3 (and not even VBR!) that you have to use MP3, and you can't have multiple s, so how would you do this? A separate RSS feed for Opus, linked only on the website and not submitted to aggregators?

Presumably a separate RSS feed. There are podcasts that have separate Ogg RSS feeds.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#78

Post by triangleman »

gwern wrote: post #66
MrRadar wrote: post #21

Codec2 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

Codec2 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

raises hand

Question for IP experts: now that I have heard of the existence of WaveNet and a rough idea of how it works (training a neural network to decode low-bitrate speech data with as much fidelity as possible to the original), would I be prohibited from selling a similar product built with the same technique? How about if I had never heard of WaveNet and went about doing the same thing?

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#79

Post by BenjiWiebe »

mockery wrote: post #2

None 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. :(

Even works in the embedded browser of the "Materialistic" HN reader app, on Android 5.1.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#80

Post by rspeer »

bmdavi3 wrote: post #47
jancsika wrote: post #44

Would 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

Or 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 voic…

Without 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

Post reply on HN