Meta's AI Codec Fits A Whole Song on One Sheet of Paper

The trick is Meta's EnCodec, an AI audio codec that turned a 2.9MB MP3 into a file of about 21KB.

Scan the codes, feed them to the decoder, and the song plays again.

It is a brilliant stunt, but not a new way to keep your music - and the famous 1,000x figure needs a footnote.

How a song fits in eight QR codes

The project is called Paper Tunes, built by the maker Makestreme and published in August. The song itself is 2 minutes 7 seconds long.

1. The AI listens. EnCodec turns the audio into a short stream of tokens at 3 kbps - a description of the sound rather than the sound itself.
2. The file is split. The 21KB result is cut into eight chunks of about 3KB, each tagged with a one-byte number.
3. Each chunk becomes a QR code. The maker used the biggest QR size there is, with the lowest error correction, to squeeze in as much data as possible.
4. Playback runs in reverse. A Python script reads all eight codes from a scan, puts them back in order and hands them to the EnCodec decoder, which rebuilds a WAV file.

Is it really 1,000 times smaller?

It depends what you compare it with. Against the 2.9MB MP3, the 21KB file is about 135 times smaller.

The 1,000x figure holds against the same two minutes as uncompressed CD-quality audio, which takes about 22MB. The MP3 had already done a big chunk of the shrinking before the AI touched it.

What it sounds like

Good enough to recognise, not good enough for your headphones. The EnCodec model used here is mono, and early listeners say it changes the music noticeably.

The maker also tried 1.5 kbps to save space, and the sound fell apart. 3 kbps was the lowest setting that still worked.

Paper has its own risks too. With error correction turned down to the minimum, a coffee ring or a bad crease can make a code unreadable.

An old trick with a new codec

Printing data on paper is not new. In 1985, the Cauzin Softstrip let magazines print software as barcode strips of up to about 5,500 bytes, which readers scanned straight into their computers.

What has changed is the codec. Forty years later, the same kind of paper can carry a whole song instead of a small program.

Want small audio files today?

You do not need an AI model for that. Opus Audio Codec is the everyday champion of small files - clear speech at very low bitrates, good music at a fraction of an MP3's size, and it plays in almost every modern browser.

If you prefer clicking to typing commands, foobar2000 with its Free Encoder Pack converts your music to Opus in a couple of steps.

On a phone, the free Audio Converter shrinks a song to MP3 or OGG right in your browser, without uploading it anywhere.

Curious about the codec itself? Read our explainer on Lyra and EnCodec, the two AI codecs built for very low bandwidth.

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