{"id":15930,"date":"2026-08-17T12:01:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T12:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=15930"},"modified":"2026-08-17T12:01:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T12:01:26","slug":"maker-compresses-a-2-9mb-song-by-1000x-and-prints-it-on-paper-as-eight-qr-codes-21kb-song-is-two-minutes-long-requires-a-neural-network-for-playback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=15930","title":{"rendered":"Maker compresses a 2.9MB song by 1000x and prints it on paper as eight QR codes \u2014 21KB song is two minutes long, requires a neural network for playback"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n Luke James <\/strong>
\n •
\nAugust 16, 2026\n<\/div>\n\n

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A maker known as Makestreme has printed an entire two-minute song onto a sheet of paper, publishing the full build and source code on Hackster.io<\/a>. The trick is Meta’s EnCodec neural audio codec, which crunched a 2.9MB MP3 down to roughly 21KB of latent tokens, a reduction of about 1,000 times, small enough to split across eight QR codes<\/a> arranged as a double-sided “paper cassette.” The same 21KB file was also beamed between two ESP32<\/a> boards over LoRa radio, and by our reading of the published transmitter code, that wireless transfer takes around 90 minutes per song.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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The open-source codec Meta <\/a>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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

The paper may last centuries, as Cerabyte argues with its microscopic QR codes etched in ceramic<\/a>, but the song only survives as long as the neural network that can decode it.<\/p>\n<\/article>\n

Read the full article →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Luke James • August 16, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-hardware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}