Store Tunes on Paper and Stream Them over LoRA

Store Tunes On Paper And Stream Them Over LoRA | Hackaday

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.

9 thoughts on “Store Tunes On Paper And Stream Them Over LoRA”

Yay. I can now replace my CD collection with floppies!

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Not so fast…droplets of sweat falls on it such that the ink begins to run?

It goes from Black Flag to Brian Eno.

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Check PaperBack by Oleh Yuschuk https://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/

You could store about 0,5 MB of data on a single page of A4 paper.

That means an entire "Leje się sperma" song by Dr. ALBONista would fit on about 4 sheets of A4 paper.

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Is anyone supposed to know who you’re talking about?

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If encodec can get a ~3 minute song down to ~21 KB, I wonder how small it would make a voice recording.

My thought would be that if Meshtastic could bundle that in, it could add a walkie-talkie function that works over the mesh. It currently has (or had?) an experimental voice message mode, but it could only work over LoRA at 2.4 GHz which isn’t a common use. I don’t even see that module in the latest version of the app, so they may have removed it.

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Replying to myself after some thought:

If I recall, the (former?) "Audio" module in Meshtastic used Codec2 which can compress speech down to 450-700 bps. I’ve played around with that, and 700 was often pretty rough but you could make still make it out.

If 700bps was too much for the LoRa mesh to handle, then 1.5 kbps would be way too much. I didn’t catch (or the video didn’t show) the spreading factor used, but I have a few of those UART->LoRa modules, and they are pretty much only good for point-to-point. Even at a higher SF, you could probably transmit that P2P where it would likely clog up a mesh that’s having to rebroadcast it.

Still, I may try it experimentally and see how it goes. Maybe setting a low hop count on those so they’re only reaching direct peers or, at most, 1 hop away may mitigate that.

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Does the model run locally or do you need to be on the web to decode it?

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Locally.

https://github.com/facebookresearch/encodec

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Imagine. http://share.google/46lYSTYZ6WefedVTV (qrtape) using encodec …

Entire music library could be printed on thermal register tape (until the image faded!)

Or course, implementing random-play on paper tape would be the next crazy phase.

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Store Tunes on Paper and Stream Them over LoRA

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