KT-Tech Sound Compression - Music at 32 Kbit/s

Robert Buccigrossi writes: "KT-Tech, whose wireless video compression was featured in a previous Slashdot story, has released a demo for real-time sound compression at http://www.kttech.com/. Like their video, the sound compression is symmetric and is suitable for wireless real-time communication in software. It sounds better than Windows Media and MP3 at 32 Kbit/s for music and 4 Kbit/s for voice." According to the site, "licensing KT-Tech's sound codec is easy," but I bet it's not as easy as .ogg.

Comments

Limited Use

[commonchaos]

This apears to be a pretty targeted solution "suitable for wireless real-time communication in software" so comparing it to wma/mp3/ogg doesn't really apply. As far as if its better or not, it doens't really matter, mp3 is still the de-facto standard for end-user music encoding, simply because everybody uses it. And a licenced codec will never take over the "market"

Bandwidth isn't the problem

[Anztac]

MP3 at 32 bit sounds so horrible it hurts my ears, but if it's for wireless technology I can see it's precidence. Really though, why would you try to outdo ogg? Personally I don't think bandwidth is the problem at the moment, the 3G networks will solve that (hopefully.) The problem is really with the devices themself. Battery life, useability, etc.

Re:Bandwidth isn't the problem

[cryptochrome]

Nonsense. Bandwidth will always be a problem. No matter how much bandwidth you add, no matter how big you make your highways, no matter how much oil you drill, people will always use as much as you make, even if it means wasting it or creating enough traffic to degrade the whole thing. There is no substitute for efficiency. A better license can compensate for inferior technology to only a minor degree.

A one string violin

[banuaba]

"According to the site, "licensing KT-Tech's sound codec is easy," but I bet it's not as easy as .ogg. "
You know, I like free software as much as the next guy, but I understand and respect the fact that companies have to make money. I fail to see why it was necessary to throw in a dig at this company that is doing neat things just because they want to profit from their invention. Just because its not free doesn't make it bad.

Now go ahead and mod me down.

Re:A one string violin

[wfrp01]

How the fuck are people supposed to support themselves by writing software if everything has to be free?

I'd like to be a farmer. My father owns a farm. Farmed it his whole life. My father's father owned the same farm, and his father before him. I bet I have lot more emotional investment in farming than you do in programming. But you know what, I decided it's not a practical decision to follow in my father's footsteps.

Farming has been mechanized. Farms are larger, and there are fewer farmers. Do you long for the days of yore, when farming was less efficient? I do. But I also realize that that is stupid.

I'm sorry if you're having a hard time making a living programming. The world is tough that way some times. But really, when you look at the big picture, it's better that way.

Re:A one string violin

[abe ferlman]

Of course I am entitled to make a living programming

Are you entitled to make a living as a one-string violinist, even if there's no market for it?

What if the government started handing out one-string violinist jobs. Then you may be legally, but not morally, entitled.

You're not entitled to anything in a market economy, you provide a service to meet a demand or you pray for a responsible safety net. But idea ownership creates government-sponsored monopolies which artificially inflate the value of programming skill. That's a bad thing in the long run, even if it serves your narrow interest now.

The question is....

[gartogg]

Who will licence this technology for free? It's no good for linux if it's proprietary.

The other problem is that it won't co-exist with MP3. One format or the other will win out, and as we see with minidiscs, it's all about marketshare.

It's nice for proprietary technology (VOIP comnes to mind) but otherwise seems useless. With commercial technology, in 6 months there will be better compression, just like .ogg and this. It's neat, and I'd like to see an explanation of the math, though...

Re:The question is....

[nate1138]

First off, with the target platform being mobile systems (ie cellphones, and other devices that run on a 3G network), linux is kind of out of the equation. Second off, just because it is proprietary doesn't make it no good for linux. Oracle is proprietary, yet it is very good for linux server adoption. And third, it doesn't have to co-exist w/mp3 because they are different tools for different jobs. By the way, minidiscs still have quite a cult following, especially with the newer players that are barely bigger than the media that they play.

Re:The question is....

[cryptochrome]

As somebody once said, I don't want to have a toolbox filled with tools for all my jobs, I want a hammer that does all my jobs. Specialized codecs are a pain because at best you have to think about which one to choose, and at worst you have to compare a bunch of them to pick the best one, which may or may not be available. People want one codec that does the job best at all levels.

Nothing in the Ktech codec profiles suggested that they couldn't be adapted to higher quality stuff, which after all is easier to do right than the low bitrate performers. Their still image compressor can handle lossless, too.

The next golden egg

[RembrandtX]

I'm not sure if this is gonna be the next golden egg. Mp3 by hook or by crook, is now well entrenched into the market.

I do notice some differences at the lower levels .. KT sounds better than mp3 at 32k .. but who has mp3's under 128k ?

As much as it hurts to say this, having multiple compeating forms is gonna be hard in the digital music world. How many non-geeks have a diamond rio.

If you bought into the mp3 craze for $286.00 (a few years ago) and spent a month making yourself computer literate enough to use the rio for your morning workouts at the gym. What are the odds that you are going to be willing to shell out more $$ .. for a product you have to relearn, just cause it sounds a little better.

I think the mass market [the same folks buying into the m-life hype] is going to be a little less inclined to jump on a band wagon .. especially the mpe-sceners .. who were weened on free music. Anyone who was buying music in the 80's remember how long you waited before buying your first CD? (at $45.00 for 'The Wall' i didn't buy a second for quite some time)

I think this falls under the 10X rule again.
[the 10X rule being that something either has to be 10X cheaper .. or 10X more efficient to make a world-changing difference in an established market.]

Re:The next golden egg

[elefantstn]

I do notice some differences at the lower levels .. KT sounds better than mp3 at 32k .. but who has mp3's under 128k ?

Well, nobody encodes their cds at 32k or 64k, but they do broadcast at those bitrates. An improvement there could be useful.

Re:The Beam in Thy Eyes

[banuaba]

I'm not disagreeing with that statement. But there is no *point* to adding that little tidbit on to the end of the article. All it is is a dig at a company that has done something cool. It's offtopic and petty, IMHO.

Re:The Beam in Thy Eyes

[(void*)]

I don't see it as a dig. I see it as a reminder to that there is a free alternatives out there, and they had better come out with something better if they want to survive as a proprietry format. It need not be interpreted as a demand for them to release it free.

Re:Won't beat out .ogg

[SideEffects]

It would seem to me that most all of the postings so far are missing the point of this technology.

Its unique selling proposition is "It sounds good at extremely low bit rates" which is good for wireless. Yes, 3G will come out sometime in our lifetime (maybe) but that still doesn't mean that we know how the pricing is going to be structured for this. We could get nailed with a per megabyte fee. Also, the carriers only have so much bandwidth on each cell tower. Remember they have T1s and the like running to these cell towers and each cell has to service hundreds and up to thousands of users at the same time. So, to the carriers it makes a big difference what the band width is. (Yes, I work in the wireless business and this is a very real concern)

So what does this mean to you? Well, the carriers will be the ones who specify, to a certain degree, what codec they would like to see on the phones from their OEMs and you can be sure they would rather see a codec which requires less bandwidth. So, some partnerships are most likely developing between the carriers and these guys (and the carriers' default WAP portal site owners - which usually are just the carriers themselves).

If we look at this from the point of just comparing it to MP3 it makes no sense. But if we look at it from a broader business sense it may make very good sense.

The Next Big Thing

[Sludge]

Embedded devices aside, The Next Big Thing has to be lossless codecs. Consider the scenario that made MP3 flourish (at least for me): 33.6 dialup, P133 with 40 megs of ram and a 2 gig hard drive.

Yes, all my stuff is now at a higher bitrate, but my machine is twenty times as efficient in every category mentioned above. Forget more efficient lossy algorithms. I'm going to be interested in lossless compression Real Soon Now.

Re:The Next Big Thing

[American AC in Paris]

You're going to be hard pressed to find a lossless codec too much more efficient than those currently available. Even if you were to design a compression algorithm tailored specifically to music or spoken word, you're still going to be dealing with enough variation between samples that you'll eventually need to rely on some mix of tried and true lossless compression schemes (barring radical advancements in compression theory, that is.)

That said, there exist lossless audio compression schemes that will give you fairly reliable results in the 25%-75% compression range. These are great for high-quality reproduction and high speed (high speed as in fast disk access, not as in cable modem/DSL) access, but you're still looking at a 160 MB download (near-best case scenario) for a single CD of music.

Re:ya.

[mcspock]

if they spent all their time working on a slick MFC app instead of writing a good decoder, i wouldn't be impressed.

think about it: any flunky can write mfc apps, how many people out there can do codec work? not many, i assure you.

Not impressive at all for speech

[Anonymous Coward]

The speech, even at 8kbits/sec, doesn't sound as good as speeck encoded at 1kbit/sec (yes, one) with DSP Truespeech...

I've used it to encode audio book content for use on an old PDA (Casio E-100), 90 minutes of better-than-just-understandable speech = ~ 5.5MB

Re:Mass market? I don't think so...

[Sycraft-fu]

Won't happen. To do this would require the replacement/upgrade of all the telecom switches and this would be EXPENSIVE. Those big 7/REs aren't cheap, believe me we have one at work (university). It would be a bightmare trying to get the system to work with this new compression and to get that to interface with older systems that didn't. To make matters worse, the system would be exponentially more expensive. Right now the audio data is just sent PCM (uncompressed), no compression hardware needed. IF you want to do compression, now you have to have the compression hardware on EACH AND EVERY CHANNEL. Multiply this by millions of lines and add in the overall system upgrade and you have a cost nightmare.