codec

Definition

A coder–decoder pair that compresses a signal and reconstructs it. Modern ones are learned, and their importance goes beyond compression: a neural audio codec turns a continuous waveform into a short sequence of discrete tokens, which lets a language model generate speech or music with the same machinery it uses for text. Reconstruction quality at a given bitrate is the headline number, but token-sequence length is what decides whether downstream modelling is tractable.

Explainers using this term

• Why Opus Won — The Design of a Modern Audio CodecDefinition of the Opus Audio Codec