Using wavpack for real-time audio coding in interactive applications

Highly interactive real-time music applications like network music performance (NMP) currently lack appropriate audio codecs that meet both demands for low delay and high audio quality. Music audio codecs introduce unacceptable processing latencies, while low-delay speech codecs provide insufficient audio quality. In this article we describe how we integrated the WavPack audio coding scheme into our NMP system for interactive distributed network centric music performances. Our evaluation shows that WavPack performs very well in such types of delay-critical applications. In NMP it provides high compression ratios and good audio quality without additional buffering delays.