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One QR code tops out at roughly 3KB of binary data, with Makestreme hitting the practical limit at about 3.3KB, so a 2.9MB MP3 would need close to a thousand of them. Conventional compression can't close that gap because MP3 is itself already lossy, which is where EnCodec comes in.
Watch On The open-source codec Meta released in 2022 converts a waveform into discrete tokens that a matching decoder turns back into audio, and at the project's 3 kbps setting, the reconstructed song reportedly held up well. At 1.5 kbps, however, it produced heavily degraded output.
Each of the eight QR codes carries a 1-byte ID plus a chunk of the token stream, four codes per side in a nod to flipping a vinyl record . The generator script uses the lowest error correction level to maximize density, so there's no redundancy to spare: damage one code and the song is gone.
LoRa pairs two ESP32s with REYAX RYLR998 modules on 866 MHz, moving the file in 160-byte packets with an ACK-and-retry protocol. The transmitter sketch hard-codes a 40-second pause after every acknowledged packet, and at roughly 134 packets for a 21KB file, the gaps alone add up to about 90 minutes. That pacing is deliberately conservative for duty-cycle compliance, and it's a far cry from the 190 KB/s another developer hit recently by streaming QR codes between phones at 60 FPS .
Streaming QR codes at 60 FPS achieves nearly 190 KB/s data rate in phone-to-phone tests
Retro gaming enthusiast attempts loading games to Sega Genesis from a vinyl record player, recording game data as sound
Mind-bending self-replicating GIF code prints an exact copy of itself, is both a program and its own visual output
Printing software on paper dates back to the Cauzin Softstrip of 1985, a 2D barcode that let magazines publish programs at up to 5,500 bytes per strip and faded once floppy disks got cheap. It left behind strips almost nobody can read today, and Paper Tunes inherits the same dependency: the QR codes store tokens, not audio, so playback requires EnCodec's exact 24 kHz decoder.
The paper may last centuries, as Cerabyte argues with its microscopic QR codes etched in ceramic , but the song only survives as long as the neural network that can decode it.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/maker-compresses-a-2-9mb-song-1000-times-with-metas-ai-codec-and-prints-it-on-paper-as-eight-qr-codes#main
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