Embedded Audio Coder (EAC) - Comparisons

(For ACM Multimedia 2002 submission)

We compare the EAC against the following benchmark audio coders.

• Fraunhofer IIS MPEG layer-3 encoder (MP3)
• MPEG-4 TwinVQ (ISO/IEC 14496-5/FPDAM 1), decoder options: -d 1 -c "-mp4ff "
• Microsoft Windows Media Audio (WMA™) Version 8.0
• Real™ Producer 8.51
• WINSAC - a scalable audio coder

The test audio waveform is the MPEG-4 sound quality assessment materials (SQAM). The original audio is in stereo and sampled at 44.1kHz.

There are three set of experiments:

• Mono audio coding experiments
• Stereo audio coding experiments
• EAC scalability demonstration

A few comments on the experimental data set:

• Certain audio coder does not support stereo audio coding, and may not support certain coding bitrate. The corresponding experiment point is marked as N/A (not available).
• For easy download, we have concatenated 16 audio test clips into one large clips of 349 second.
• The test clip is pretty long (almost 6 minutes), and consists of different audio content. For best comparison, you may want to first download the clip to the local, decoded it to an editable form(e.g., wav), and listen to the clips in your favoriate player.
• The original audio waveform is 58.7MB in stereo, and 29.3MB in mono. Please make sure that you have a good connection before attempting to download the original audio waveform.

• The decoded audio waveform of the coder is not put on the web due to its large size (29.3MB in mono, 58.7MB in stereo). Please download decoder from the respective coder's web site. If you have difficulties to get a specific decoder to work, please contact the author for the decoded waveform of the coder.

©Copyright by Jin Li, Apr. 21, 2002