Some recent advances in music technology

As cassette tapes and long-playing records phasing out, research in digital audio technologies had reached a state where high fidelity audio content can be made available and conveniently portable. Meanwhile, the continuous advancement of mobility, network access and storage technologies will soon make this content accessible anytime, anywhere with high fidelity and personalized. In this talk, we first take a look at the advancement of music technologies. Then, a system that allows distribution of music through adaptive streaming is discussed, in which it can flexibly deliver audio quality up to perfect fidelity. Rate control mechanism is implemented to control the target quality of the streaming audio, and vary the instantaneous rate of streaming audio to achieve optimum quality. To ensure best possible quality at lowest bit rate possible, a perceptually enhanced feature is added and together the target quality is jointly determined by both the available streaming bandwidth, and the R-D relationship of the coded frames.