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.

Re:Bandwidth isn't the problem

[ushac]

It's sill a problem. The 3G networks, or even 2.5G (EDGE, GPRS, etc) offers bandwith enough to play decent quality music. The problem is the cost.

The new packet based systems charge on a data download basis as opposed to the old per minute charge. This is great news for WAP, SMS and other small text-based things. Here in Sweden the biggest mobile operator Telia charges about 2 cents per Kb for GPRS, so reading som e-mails, broswing some news via WAP or whatever won't cost you much and you don't have to hurry as you did with the 50 cents/min charge over GSM. But with high bandwith features like audio the picture is quite different.

At 32kbit/s (which offers quite poor audio) you're downloading 4 Kbyte/s. That's 8 cents per second, or $4.80/min. That's a little hefty for me thank you very much... A more efficient codec could really save you some bucks.

I think I'll wait till 3G is widely available and not horribly overpriced. I'm hoping it won't be that many years. Streaming from monkeyradio.org directly to my handset would be really neat :)

Regards / ushac

License agreement

[Dante Alighieri]

This is part of the license agreement to which you must agree before downloading the file to play the demo sounds... 4. TERMINATION. This Agreement will automatically terminate after one (1) year. KT Tech may terminate this Agreement earlier if you do not abide by the terms and conditions of this Agreement. In the event of any termination, you must destroy all copies of the Software and all of its component parts. Am I going mad or does this mean that we would be required to delete the software from our hard drives after a year? Is this a standard part of a software license agreement?

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 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.

That's nothing

[epepke]

I can compress any Britney Spears song down to zero bits without loss of quality.

Winamp rul3z!

[TheSHAD0W]

I'm wondering how long it'll take for someone to hack apart the ktsplayer executable and rework it as a Winamp module?

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

[martyb]

I can see applications for this beyond just the mass market. My first thought would be for carrying additioanl voice circuits over a T1 line. (Say, for carryting voice traffic between two locations in a large company.)

A T1 line suports 24 circuits, each of which has IIRC 64Kbps (ignoring RBS, etc.) Whatever. Each of these circuits can support one conversation. Using this technology, several more conversations could be carried on one circuit. (Their web site states 8Kbits for high-quality voice; 4Kbits for intelligible voice.) Even using the 8Kbit rate, that means 8 conversations could be carried on one voice circuit.

The result? A single T1 could carry 192 conversations instead of just 24. Or, put another way, get 8 T1's of voice capacity for the price of just one T1. At anywhere from $600-$1000 per T1, that adds up really fast.

Now, how long would it be until the phone company decides to replace POTS circuits with one of these? Dial-up users would find their modems capped at 8Kbits? Blech!

They cheated

[Magila]

They added noise to all the other encodings. Don't believe me? I re-encoded their 8 kbps kts stream to 8.5 kbps rm and even after the recompression it sounds better, listen.

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: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.

File size

[acoustix]

Has anybody else noticed that all of the .kts files are larger than the mp3 files?

8kbps = .6KB larger
32kbps = 3.3KB larger
64kbps = 4KB larger

I know that its not a big deal with those small amounts. But, also, those demo files are pretty small. What will be difference when using larger files or streaming?

Re:are you guys deaf?

[RadioheadKid]

I agree that kts does not beat wma at 32kbs. Furthermore, it may beat mp3, but that's really not a big deal. Most new compression schemes beat mp3 at low bitrates (Ogg Vorbis, WMA). Really not impressed with this at all...

Re:Horribly off topic I know but...

[jonathan_ingram]

.ogg is a media container, like .avi, .asf, (or .mov -- Quicktime -- which is a better comparison).

Vorbis is an audio codec. You can in principle use Vorbis outside of its Ogg wrapper (there is code to do this in recent versions of NanDub, but it never really left the experimental stage).

More interestingly, you can wrap DivX video + Vorbis audio (+ subtitles, + anything else) inside an Ogg wrapper, and get a versatile, streamable replacement for .avi files. See doom9.org for more information on this (note that people have taken to giving ogg movies the extension .ogm, due to everything in the Windows world being file extension based, and their being no good all-in-one .ogg audio/video player).

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.

We've been doing compression for decades.

[billstewart]

Telcos have been doing various kinds of voice compression for decades, especially on international circuits; an important feature has been detecting modem and fax tones and turning off compression. We used to use analog techniques, then digital, then fancier digital. There's not much compression used within the United States, but lots of international calling on traditional telcos runs at 32kbps. Many of the new low-price international carriers use Voice-Over-IP technology - you may be getting 8kbps. And in addition to the telephones-on-both-ends carriers, there are the international Internet-to-telephone gateway companies like Net2Phone which go for the consumer market.

But the place you really see voice compression on T1s is between corporate PBXs - if you've got enough traffic between your offices to keep 12 or 24 channels full, it might make sense to run a private line, and until the mid-80s lots of companies did this, but by the time everybody's PBX was smart enough to be good at it, the price of Voice-by-the-minute from long distance telcos was cheap enough that almost everybody ripped that stuff out except for multiple offices in the same city. But compression equipment has become cheap enough and good enough that lots of people are rebuilding those networks that we ripped out in the 80s, especially since IP data networks mean that even if VOIP isn't cost-effective by itself, you can piggyback some voice on a data network for not much extra operating cost, and the equipment cost may pay off pretty quickly.

Companies are more likely to use voice compression on international circuits, because the price of pipes across the ocean is usually atrociously high, but the price per minute for phone calls to much of Asia is also atrociously high, so a dedicated line using compressed voice is still often a good deal. It doesn't usually sound as good as a Real Telephone Call, but lots of Asian telcos don't have the best sound quality either. The other big trend that's appearing in international calls is VOIP over internet connections - the quality is more variable, but the price of a T1 or E1 internet connection in Asia is often similar to the price of a 64kbps or 128kbps frame relay PVC.

Not enough info to determine usability

[billstewart]

The web page doesn't have enough information to tell if the technology is usable. It's got some examples of compressed files, and a demo program, which does say that it's not vaporware and that at least for some kinds of sound samples it provides good compression and probably-pretty-good sound quality for the bitrates it uses. But that doesn't tell me enough to know if it's usable for any real applications. It needs several things:

• Documentation on what kinds of sound compression it can support at what bit rates, and what frequencies it supports. Is this the same algorithm for music as for 3kHz voice? Can you do really good voice with 11kHz stereo inputs, or do its voice compression modes only do a better or worse job of reproducing the same raw 64kbps / 3kHz voice stream?
• CPU horsepower requirements for compression. Is this a job for a DSP, or a fast PC, or a slow PC, or a Palm Pilot, or a wristwatch?
• CPU horsepower requirements for decompression. It's often lower than compression, but not always.
• Latency requirements for Compression and Decompression - is this usable for real-time conversations, or only for canned speech? This is separate from the horsepower requirements, which can be fixed by faster processors - many of the common algorithms require N voice samples to run the compression algorithm over, which is ok if you need 10ms of sound, marginally usable if you need 100ms, and unusable for conversations if you need 1 second of sound samples to get the compression rates (even though it's fine for music playback and other one-way sound applications.)
• If possible, standard voice compression quality scores compared to the popular compression algorithms.
• Information on what kind of licensing is negotiable and what isn't - can I give away free players and only pay/charge for compression tools, or do I have to charge every listener money for the decompression client? This makes a huge difference for web applications - it's much easier to get a web page publisher to pay for a tool with better compression than to get their readers to pay - that's Kiss Of Death mode.
  

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

[psavo]

98% percent of telco's cost is about those lines buried into ground. Actual cost of switching equipment is minimal.