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

[darkdragon-001]

Is there any SIP software (server and client) which has implemented this codec?

[krzyzowiec]

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.

I was just thinking the same thing. I used to care about the differences between codecs, but I realized I have so much storage that I don't even use... that I may as well use FLAC for everything.

[linuxgeex]

Is there any SIP software (server and client) which has implemented this codec?

There's no compelling reason to do so. Saving 2kbits per second (3kbps) vs Opus (5kbps) is pointless. If instead Google had focused on something meaningful, like using AI to separate speech from background sounds so that it was a clearer call, then you bet this would have been a big priority.

Now for some SIP education:

When you get down to 5kbps for low-latency audio, the transport overhead becomes *much* more expensive than the payload, because you need to create audio frames that are only a handful of bytes, so the SSL/TCP/ZRTP/SIP/Codec headers/envelopes/packaging outweigh the actual audio data portion of the frames, and not by a small amount. Going below 5 is increasingly meaningless.

This is part of the reason why Opus itself is taking forever to be adopted... because going from 8kbps (GSM low-rate / G.729a) to 5kbps was already pretty meaningless.