Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Always love a good bellard ship.

This is definitely better than some of the others out there. I threw together some comparisons here at 7kb/s for mp3/opus/aac: https://non.io/TSAC-Comparisons

Happy to add other comparisons if others want any.

Overall, it's FAR better at these lower bit rates, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily good. One issue I see off the bat is that volume is fairly inconsistent in the output for TSAC, which makes stereo in particular quite hard to listen to with the volume "flickering" in each channel independently.



Since Ballard's codec is "AI" based, can you add google's lyrav2 ( https://github.com/google/lyra ) and Facebook's/meta EnCodec ( https://github.com/facebookresearch/encodec ).

Also I don't seem to be able to access your page, so there might be error.

Finally, when doing opus comparison it's good now to denote if it is using Lace or NoLace decoder post processing filters that became available in opus 1.5 (note, this feature need to be enabled at compile time, and defying decode a new API call needs to be made to force higher complexity decoder) . See https://opus-codec.org/demo/opus-1.5/


> Also I don't seem to be able to access your page, so there might be error.

Interesting, do you have javascript turned off? Can you access this page? https://html.non.io/TSAC-Comparisons/


The page works, earlier when I tried I got a login page. This page is good.

Also awesome to see comparison to EnCodec , which I think is one of the better ones available : https://ai.honu.io/papers/encodec/samples.html

Also, can you confirm if Opus decode is classical or with Lace or NoLace post processing filters that are available in Opus 1.5?


Also I added EnCodec, but wasn't able to get the prereqs working for lyra2.


I've encoded xHE-AAC at 6 kbit/s mono, which is the closest match I could get. It performs much better and is widely supported (Android 9/iOS 13/macOS 10.15/Windows 11), although there are no free low bitrate encoders available yet. I used the Fraunhofer IIS Pro with EZ CD Audio Converter. It would be great if you could add it: https://filebin.net/x46m1x7n6d2t7e6b


Yes! This is even at 44.1 kHz, so you might even find that you get perceptually better results by trying a lower sampling rate (32 kHz, 22 kHz, etc.).


Thats much more helpful comparison. TSAC clearly works far better than mp3 and opus for low bitrates.


Another useful model to compare to would be DAC https://github.com/descriptinc/descript-audio-codec

This is the codec that TSAC extended, so it could be a nice comparison to see. I'd also echo Vocos (from sibling comment), it operates on the same Encodec tokens but generally has better reconstruction quality.


Which Opus settings did you use? Note that Opus recently got new ML features: https://opus-codec.org/demo/opus-1.5/


Could you add VOCOS at 1.5, 3.0 and 6.0? https://gemelo-ai.github.io/vocos/




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: