Google Releases Lyra 1.3 For Advancing This Very Low Bitrate Audio Codec

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Releases Lyra 1.3 For Advancing This Very Low Bitrate Audio Codec

In early 2021 Google announced Lyra as a very low bitrate codec intended for speech with aims of getting Lyra and AV1 possible for video chats on 56 kbps connections...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Google-Lyra-1.3

[johanb]

However, the Lyra bitstream has changed and is incompatible with prior releases due to the weight differences.

Ugh, is it really that hard to just bump the major version so you instantly see that it's incompatible.

[Beherit]

I'd love to see a video demoing what a video over a 56k link looks like.

I remmber the mid 90s when RealAudio made the same promise, and it both looked and sounded like shit.

[archkde]

Does it still contain the closed-source blob?

[birdie]

Does it still contain the closed-source blob?

Weights? Most likely. Not sure if they count as a blob because you're not executing them per se.

[archkde]

Weights? Most likely. Not sure if they count as a blob because you're not executing them per se.

No, I meant the shared library that I now found out has been removed over 1 year ago. Sorry for the noise. But yeah, the weights are another issue.

[ssokolow]

I'd love to see a video demoing what a video over a 56k link looks like.

I remmber the mid 90s when RealAudio made the same promise, and it both looked and sounded like shit.

But RealAudio didn't have 20-30 years of Moore's Law and whatever you call the modified post-Moore's Law analogue for "performance per unit ..." that industry expectations still drives. I'm reminded of a recent question on the retrocomputing stackexchange where someone asked why we didn't use high-performance codecs back when storage was so expensive. (Answer: computing was also prohibitively primitive)

[Mitch]

Can we expect this to automatically pop up in phones? What about Bluetooth audio calls and voice chat?

This is all really cool but it would be nice to see how and where Google is implementing this. Their prior announcement seemed a little vague.

[linuxgeex]

Can we expect this to automatically pop up in phones? What about Bluetooth audio calls and voice chat?

This is all really cool but it would be nice to see how and where Google is implementing this. Their prior announcement seemed a little vague.

It might show up in voice chat apps, but the tech is moving too quickly for the telecoms industry to switch to it. I mean look at how long it's taken for the GSM low-rate codec to become a widely adopted standard... over 25 years, and that lowered the audio rate from 64kbps to 8kbps, in a time window where 64kbps was actually expensive! And now you can get similar performance from Opus with 5kbps, so a codec that goes below 5kbps... really... can we not afford 300kbits per minute of conversation in 2022 when the selfie the contact shares with us is 60Mbytes? LOL If anything we should be working back toward lossless audio.

[CochainComplex]

For the germans here: This means we will be able to use Zoom without hickups in the near future !!!
.... (for the non germans: dispite the fact that we have quite wealthy country ...internet speed in some areas even cities is below medium OECD lvl).