  We introduce a state-of-the-art real-time, high-fidelity, audio codec
leveraging neural networks. It consists in a streaming encoder-decoder
architecture with quantized latent space trained in an end-to-end fashion. We
simplify and speed-up the training by using a single multiscale spectrogram
adversary that efficiently reduces artifacts and produce high-quality samples.
We introduce a novel loss balancer mechanism to stabilize training: the weight
of a loss now defines the fraction of the overall gradient it should represent,
thus decoupling the choice of this hyper-parameter from the typical scale of
the loss. Finally, we study how lightweight Transformer models can be used to
further compress the obtained representation by up to 40%, while staying faster
than real time. We provide a detailed description of the key design choices of
the proposed model including: training objective, architectural changes and a
study of various perceptual loss functions. We present an extensive subjective
evaluation (MUSHRA tests) together with an ablation study for a range of
bandwidths and audio domains, including speech, noisy-reverberant speech, and
music. Our approach is superior to the baselines methods across all evaluated
settings, considering both 24 kHz monophonic and 48 kHz stereophonic audio.
Code and models are available at github.com/facebookresearch/encodec.
