Some projects seem too good to be true until you dig into it and find the secret magic that makes it all work. Take Paper Tunes by [Makestreame], a project which purports to store a song on a single sheet of paper via QR code and transmit the data over LoRA. If it was a MIDI sequence, maybe. But the promise of Paper Tunes is to take any MP3 and give it this treatment, and that just seems like an impossible level of compression at first glance.
The music is heavily compressed, make no doubt about that. There’s samples in the Instructables link above and in the video below, but it sounds far better than it has any right to. The secret is Meta’s EnCodec neural codec, which like you’d guess uses neural nets to squeeze the absolute minimum information needed to reconstruct a sample. With it [Makestreame] is able to get a 2.9 MB MP3 file down to just 21.44 kB.
Of course, that’s still not going to fit in a 3.3 kB QR code. But by simply making eight of them, [Makestreame] is able to fit the song onto the front and back of a piece of paper. Yes, each song has an “A” and a “B” side — and you thought flipping a record halfway through got old fast. Having to scan eight codes to get one song may strike some as a bit silly, but we do enjoy some silly things here.
The same EnCodec compression that gets the song so tiny as to fit in a brace of QR codes is obviously also what enables its transmission over LoRA. While it’s got far lower bandwidth than something like WiFi, 21 kB is well within its limits. It’s often said that LoRA isn’t suitable for audio, but this project is another example that one person’s “unsuitable” is another person’s “challenge accepted”.
We’ve seen other LoRA audio projects before. Speaking of things not suitable for audio, we once featured an entire album crammed onto a floppy disk. Continue reading “Store Tunes On Paper And Stream Them Over LoRA”
