  A good audio codec for live applications such as telecommunication is
characterized by three key properties: (1) compression, i.e.\ the bitrate that
is required to transmit the signal should be as low as possible; (2) latency,
i.e.\ encoding and decoding the signal needs to be fast enough to enable
communication without or with only minimal noticeable delay; and (3)
reconstruction quality of the signal. In this work, we propose an open-source,
streamable, and real-time neural audio codec that achieves strong performance
along all three axes: it can reconstruct highly natural sounding 48~kHz speech
signals while operating at only 12~kbps and running with less than 6~ms
(GPU)/10~ms (CPU) latency. An efficient training paradigm is also demonstrated
for developing such neural audio codecs for real-world scenarios. Both
objective and subjective evaluations using the VCTK corpus are provided. To sum
up, AudioDec is a well-developed plug-and-play benchmark for audio codec
applications.

Audio and Speech Processing