It is impressive, but it's also not something I would want to use for music listening. I guess the "10x" goal makes for an impressive chart, but I'd like to know what are the more realistic goals and gains.

The interesting part to me was that they used specifically a 64kbps example, not a higher bitrate that would be more appropriate for music listening. Just speculating, but if they managed to get 10x higher compression rate compared to 64kbps MP3, could they achieve an even higher compression rate when compared to 320kbps MP3? If the algorithm is so good that it can compress audio down to 6kbps with just a few artifacts, would it sound almost good at 12kbps? 24kbps?

Between this effort and the recently announced Google-led multi-channel/immersive audio codec initiative, I am pretty excited about the future of audio streaming and distribution.

> they used specifically a 64kbps example, not a higher bitrate that would be more appropriate for music listening.

... but only if you are a bat.

Bitrate as it pertains to the size is the purpose of all of this.

> not something I would want to use for music listening

The flute in particular suffers quite a lot and the triangle disappears completely!

It is something you would want though if you are hosting content with audio consumed by people who aren't paying attention to audio quality.

Because writeups are done at the last second, rather than as part of the project.