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

Posted by timothy on from the fine-print-time dept.

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.

6 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. A one string violin by banuaba · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    --


    Brant

    Argle. Bargle.
  2. Re:Bandwidth isn't the problem by cryptochrome · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --

    ---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?

  3. Re:The Beam in Thy Eyes by banuaba · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --


    Brant

    Argle. Bargle.
  4. That's nothing by epepke · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  5. Mass market? I don't think so... by martyb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  6. They cheated by Magila · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.