Right audio codec implementation
October 12, 2017

Choosing the Right Audio Codec Implementation

by Preethi P Nair (Lead, Content Marketing)

Leverage five key evaluation criteria to choose the right audio codec implementation for your application

Be it enterprise or popular consumer electronic applications, today’s users expect nothing less than outstanding audio quality. Which is why manufacturers seek the right audio codec solutions to power their products. While high performance software audio codecs enable us to engineer superior audio experiences, choosing the right audio ccodec implementation for an application can be a highly complex and challenging task.

In this blog, we recommend five key decisive factors and provide a quick checklist under each factor to help engineers simplify their codec evaluation process. For more in-depth insights, read our new whitepaper on Software Audio Codec Assessment, supported by relevant examples and a detailed case study.

Top five criteria and checklists for selecting the right audio codec

  1. Features and platforms
    • What are the codecs you need to support in your products or services?
    • What are the unique codec features specific to your application?
    • Are you working on a single processor, a processor family, or multiple processor families?
    • Do the vendors support the formats and features on your platforms of interest?
  2. Performance
    • What is the codec performance on your actual target platform with complex audio inputs?
    • What is the application headroom required in your product?
    • What is the peak to average performance ratio across a variety of complex content?
  3. Quality and compliance
    • Have you factored in the absolute RMS errors, and the objective and subjective quality measurements to differentiate between implementations?
    • Do your vendor’s test reports include results with erroneous streams? Have you performed additional testing at your end by introducing random errors in the streams?
    • Are you evaluating a floating point implementation? Does your hardware have floating point support?
  4. Integration
    • Do your vendors have ready plug-ins for your multimedia framework(s) of choice? Do they offer wider framework options to accommodate future changes in your design?
    • How well are the plug-ins validated at a system level?
  5. Reliability and Support
    • Are you satisfied with the vendor’s quality of documentation and support during evaluation?
    • Have you assessed the vendor’s track record, customer success stories and references?

For a more comprehensive picture of audio codecs and evaluation criteria, read Ittiam’s Whitepaper on Audio Codec Assessment

Mukund Srinivasan, Chief Business Officer, Ittiam shares his insights on how Ittiam’s audio codecs power the top brands with POWERFORMANCE. Read more.