Hopefully, the entire industry will NOT move in such a schematic and lossy direction. Use separate tools to analyze audio streams please. Don't throw the timbre baby out with the bathwater. MusicGen utilizes a tokenized transformer model for music, which is attractive for symbolic translation use cases. However, the overall audio quality is far more lossy than the examples you hear from Stable Audio. I believe that symbolic representation should not be a foundational approach to adequately represent and generate rich audio signals.