Neural audio codecs: how to get audio into LLMs

Each MP3 frame is entirely self-contained and can completely reconstruct a few tens of milliseconds of original audio. It does not require other frames to do this. I think this is the most important element. At 128kbps CBR, each MP3 frame is ~418 bytes and covers ~26 milliseconds of time. This is a reduction of 10-11x over the raw PCM waveform. MP3 is also designed to eliminate the information that humans don't seem to care about.

I don't know if it's possible to use 400 byte tokens in a transformer model, but I would be very compelled to try.

But you'd need that information to be digestible for a neural network. Otherwise, you'll have a very hard time getting that adapter to work.

As a rule: neural networks love highly redundant data, and hate highly compressed data at their inputs. Tokenized text good, GZIP compressed bytestream bad. But who knows, really. It's a rule of thumb, not a mathematical law. So you could have some success getting that MP3-based adapter to work. I've seen weirder shit work.