Top all-time · #2379
rowetel.com
Personal blog · rowetel.comhardwareprogramming
rowetel.com is a personal blog at rowetel.com about hardware and programming. Since 2008, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 67 times, most often “Busting Teenage Partying with a Fluksometer”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (26) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David Rowe's blog for its pages on Codec 2, an open-source low-bitrate speech codec, and LPCNet work, plus his open-source telephony and ham radio projects.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 26 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Busting Teenage Partying with a Fluksometer4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-02-07
- /?page_id=4523 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-04-06
- /?page_id=4523 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-03-07
- FreeDV 700D Released2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-30
- /wordpress/?page_id=4522 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-18
- Codec2: GNU low-bitrate speech codec (2400 bits/second)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-09-24
What Hacker News says?
Re 27 (hardware/software hybrids) there is a good example: The Free Telephony Project: http://rowetel.com/ucasterisk A community has been working on Open Hardware designs for IP telephony - embedded Asterisk boxes. The technology is now in mass production, and several commercial products are being spun out of the original, community based work.
Comment linking /ucasterisk
on “Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund”Submitted A Miserable Debt-Free Life as a story · 191 points
HN discussionAside from the seriously impressive WaveNet based results, I think the article doesn't do the codec itself enough justice. I mean, low-bitrate speech codecs have been around for some time (hey, vocoders are the oldest kind of audio codecs in history!), and I grew skeptical when they started to compare with mp3 and opus. But looking at this page Codec2 really holds its own when compared to AMBE and especially MELP, t…
Comment linking /?p=5520
on “Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk”Submitted All Your Modem Are Belong to Us as a story · 128 points
HN discussionI've been reading David Rowe's blog [0] since 2008, there are some other really interesting projects and products on it. One of my favorites back then was his home build electric car. [0] https://www.rowetel.com/
Comment linking /
on “Codec2: A Whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk”Submitted Open IP over VHF/UHF Part 5 as a story · 123 points
HN discussionThis dad used remote power monitoring to bust his daughter throwing a party at home while she was supposed to be staying with family: http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?p=2381
Comment linking /blog/?p=2381
on “This is why people fear the Internet of Things”Submitted Open IP over VHF/UHF as a story · 122 points
HN discussionThe LPCNet decoder for Codec2 enables high-quality voice calls at 1700 bits per second since 02019: http://www.rowetel.com/?p=6639 Why doesn't this article mention LPCNet or Codec2?
Comment linking /?p=6639
on “Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate”Submitted Codec 2 700C as a story · 70 points
HN discussionYeah, with Codec 2 setting the gold standard, I don't find this very impressive. I find this more intelligible at one-third of the Lyra bitrate: http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts2a_1300.wav Codec 2 does a better job of isolating the parts of sound which are most necessary to intelligible speech, without necessarily caring too much about preserving the original qualities of the speaker's voice or environmen…
Comment linking /downloads/codec2/hts2a_1300.wav
on “Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate”Submitted Measuring HF noise around a city as a story · 48 points
HN discussionhttp://www.rowetel.com/wordpress/?page_id=452 Take a look at this too. Also runnable on low power devices. And there was some work of using AI to enhance the codec2 encoded bits too.
Comment linking /wordpress/?page_id=452
on “Lyra audio codec enables high-quality voice calls at 3 kbps bitrate”Submitted Codec2: GNU low-bitrate speech codec (2400 bits/second) as a story · 47 points
HN discussionTotally possible. As an example, Codec2 used in ham-radio applications can send pretty decent voice audio at a few kilobit/s or less, and it keeps sounding perfectly understandable even at 1.2 kbit/s like this short sample: http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_1200.wav More information here: http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452
Comment linking /?page_id=452
on “Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents”Submitted Subset Vector Quantiser as a story · 13 points
HN discussion1 k bytes per second. You can [1] squish it down to 1 kbit/s but it will become hard to understand accurately at that point, even under good conditions, and hopeless if there is noise. Opus simply doesn't support bitrates below 6 kbps. [1] https://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452
Comment linking /?page_id=452
on “Anti-Lukashenka hackers seize senior Belarusian officials' personal data”Submitted GMSK Modem Simulation as a story · 8 points
HN discussionDoesn't seem that better compared to Codec2 which is already fully Open Source (LGPL), even taking into account that Codec2's examples originals are already of much worse quality than the ones on Lyra's website. I'd be curious to hear both working on the same set of audio samples. https://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452
Comment linking /?page_id=452
on “Google open-sources the Lyra audio codec”Submitted All Your Modem Are Belong to Us as a story · 7 points
HN discussionCheck out also Codec2, Open Source as well, which offers really good quality down to 700 bit/s. It has been ported to small MCUs such as the ESP32, STM32 etc. also supported by Arduino libraries. https://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452 https://github.com/deulis/ESP32_Codec2 https://www.arduino.cc/reference/en/libraries/codec2/
Comment linking /?page_id=452
on “Lyra V2 – a better, faster, and more versatile speech codec”Submitted Busting Teenage Partying with a Fluksometer as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI've been waiting for someone to do this* with audio and/or video. Amazing work. Also worth reading this related link: https://www.rowetel.com/?p=6639 There's some really exciting progress that could be made in this space. The page mentions that they could use it as a post-processing filter for Opus for better decoding to avoid changing the bitstream. It could also be useful as a way to accommodate for packet loss a…
Comment linking /?p=6639
on “A Real-Time Wideband Neural Vocoder at 1.6 Kb/S Using LPCNet”Submitted FreeDV 700E and Compression as a story · 4 points
HN discussionCodec2 is an open source speech codec, shooting for 700 - 3200 bit /s, specifically for digital voice over radio. http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=452
Comment linking /blog/?page_id=452
on “How New Long-Range Radios Will Change the Internet of Things”Submitted Open Source Low Rate Speech Codec (Part 1) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf you still have an interest in telephony you might want to look at http://www.rowetel.com/blog/ and his work on the Mesh Potato http://www.villagetelco.org/about/mesh-potato/ . It's an open source hardware project to create an easily deployed developing world "village telephony" system. Some really good content.
Comment linking /blog/
on “Damn you, Arduino...I have no free time for this.”Submitted Busting Teenage Partying with a Fluksometer as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> the audio quality is incredible, though required compute power is ridiculous. LPCnet gives similar quality with much less compuation needed: http://www.rowetel.com/wordpress/?p=6482 https://people.xiph.org/~jm/demo/lpcnet/ https://people.xiph.org/~jm/demo/lpcnet_codec/
Comment linking /wordpress/?p=6482
on “Floppycasts – 1.44MB Podcasts”Submitted VQ Index Optimisation as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
