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Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

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Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#102
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually 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 com…

What do you mean with "HDVoice"? On landline connections this usually means G722. G711u/a is definitly not "HD".

He probably means Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband (AMR-WB) [1], AKA G.722.2. There is a common misconception that it is VoLTE only, but actually it works pretty well on 3G too. It is night and day compared to legacy codecs.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi-Rate_Wideband

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#103
post #80
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#105
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I know, enough podcast apps require MP3 (and not even VBR!) that you have to use MP3… Nope! Podcast episodes can be encoded using AAC (which is as ubiquitous as MP3) without issue. That won't realistically possible with Opus until Opus hardware decoding has available in mobile devices for 5-10 years.

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…

Yeah, the last time hardware audio decoders were relevant was like... back in the Nokia N-Gage days.

The N-Gage QD removed the MP3 decoder that was present in the original model. And you could install a software player, and it would struggle with bitrates above 128kbps :D

Modern phones can decode video in software (sucks for battery life, and framerate/resolution are more limited than with hardware, but it's possible). Audio is nothing for them.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#106
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When it was patented? When I was working with AI about 15 years ago I was experimenting with conv nn to generate audio. I wouldn't have expected for this to be patented as this is so friggin obvious thing to do. It is like patenting 2+2=4 once you discover numbers.

[deleted]

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#107
I 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.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually 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 com…

>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 wa…

I think it was AT&T that had a test number you could call to hear a higher quality phone call (I was pretty young at the time, so my memory is fuzzy). I remember it sounding very good, but that test number was the only time I remember hearing that quality over the POTS. The VoLTE and HD voice I occasionally get on my iPhone reminds me of that system.

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#109
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Man that's a big collection! Though to be fair the iPod 160GB came out like ten years ago, and I thought we'd have advanced a bit more in that department by now. (Like imagine an iPod but instead of the spinny hard drive it's all microSD! There's just no market for it I guess.)

Re: Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk

#110
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When it was patented? When I was working with AI about 15 years ago I was experimenting with conv nn to generate audio. I wouldn't have expected for this to be patented as this is so friggin obvious thing to do. It is like patenting 2+2=4 once you discover numbers.

[Serious question] Does your prior art invalidate the patent?
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