EnCodec is Meta's open neural audio codec, an encoder-quantizer-decoder trained end to end to compress speech and music across a wide range of very low bitrates (roughly 1.5 to 24 kbps). It uses residual vector quantization to turn audio into a compact stream of discrete tokens and a neural decoder, trained with adversarial and reconstruction objectives, to rebuild a natural-sounding waveform. Beyond compression, those tokens have become a standard representation that generative audio and text-to-speech models build on, which is a big part of why neural codecs matter now. EnCodec, alongside Google's SoundStream and Lyra, exemplifies how learned codecs push quality at bitrates traditional codecs can't reach, at the cost of greater computation.
