New Standard: USAC, sussesor of (HE)-AAC Options

[IgorC]

It's a new standard (Unified Speech and Audio Coding – USAC, aka MPEG-D part 3).
It has reached a status of Final Draft International Standard.

Basic information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Speech_and_Audio_Coding
There are some papers about new compression schemes in internet.

There was a verification test where USAC was compared to HE-AAC v1/v2 on range of bitrates 8-96 kbps. http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/meetings/tori...orino_press.htm
The report should be available in September – October.

Some anonymous source has indicated that USAC was clearly superior to HE-AAC and it did very good on speech though something like "USAC at 48 kpbs = HE-AAC at 64 kbps" shouldn't be expected. It's more like 20-25% of bitrate gain at 20-32 kbps and 10-12% at 64 kbps. That's still pretty good.

There is no information if USAC will be used at higher bitrates as ( LC-AAC's area). The core coder of USAC includes a new enhanced SBR (eSBR).
Both SBR and new eSBR have no advantage over LC-AAC at bitrates higher than 80 kbps. It’s unclear if eSBR can be disabled at higher bitrates.


It will be interesting to hear opinions and if somebody knows something more about it.

[FreaqyFrequency]

Cool stuff! Always exciting to see the prospects of where better coding will be able to take us, especially low-bitrate streaming. If we are able to achieve perceptual transparency in bitrates under 50kbps within the next five years, that would be pretty amazing.

[Speckmade]

If we are able to achieve perceptual transparency in bitrates under 50kbps within the next five years, that would be pretty amazing.

Given that I think I remember figures of about 64 kbps for the amount of data that the brain receives from your ears that would truely be something.
On top of that you can use those new general purpose data compression tools, that can compress input regardless of content by ~30 % - and because their effect is given independent from the contents you can recursively feed their output back into them and compress every piece of audio down to 1 bit. - Amazeing!

[Canar]

On top of that you can use those new general purpose data compression tools, that can compress input regardless of content by ~30 % - and because their effect is given independent from the contents you can recursively feed their output back into them and compress every piece of audio down to 1 bit. - Amazeing!

You're funny.