{"slug": "store-tunes-on-paper-and-stream-them-over-lora", "title": "Store Tunes on Paper and Stream Them Over LoRA", "summary": "Makestreame's Paper Tunes project stores a 2.9 MB MP3 file on a single sheet of paper using eight QR codes and transmits it over LoRA, compressing the audio to 21.44 kB with Meta's EnCodec neural codec. The project demonstrates that LoRA can handle audio despite its low bandwidth, and the sound quality, while heavily compressed, is surprisingly good.", "body_md": "Some projects seem too good to be true until you dig into it and find the secret magic that makes it all work. Take [Paper Tunes by [Makestreame]](https://www.instructables.com/Paper-Tunes-Store-Music-on-Paper-and-Stream-Them-O), a project which purports to store a song on a single sheet of paper via QR code and transmit the data over LoRA. If it was a MIDI sequence, maybe. But the promise of Paper Tunes is to take any MP3 and give it this treatment, and that just seems like an impossible level of compression at first glance.\n\nThe music is heavily compressed, make no doubt about that. There’s samples in the Instructables link above and in the video below, but it sounds far better than it has any right to. The secret is [Meta’s EnCodec](https://github.com/facebookresearch/encodec) neural codec, which like you’d guess uses neural nets to squeeze the absolute minimum information needed to reconstruct a sample. With it [Makestreame] is able to get a 2.9 MB MP3 file down to just 21.44 kB.\n\nOf course, that’s still not going to fit in a 3.3 kB QR code. But by simply making eight of them, [Makestreame] is able to fit the song onto the front and back of a piece of paper. Yes, each song has an “A” and a “B” side — and you thought flipping a record halfway through got old fast. Having to scan eight codes to get one song may strike some as a bit silly, but we do enjoy some silly things here.\n\nThe same EnCodec compression that gets the song so tiny as to fit in a brace of QR codes is obviously also what enables its transmission over LoRA. While it’s got far lower bandwidth than something like WiFi, 21 kB is well within its limits. It’s often said that LoRA isn’t suitable for audio, but this project is another example that one person’s “unsuitable” is another person’s “challenge accepted”.\n\nWe’ve seen other [LoRA audio projects](https://hackaday.com/2021/06/06/qmesh-lora-mesh-networked-voice-communications/) before. Speaking of things not suitable for audio, we once featured an [entire album crammed onto a floppy disk](https://hackaday.com/2020/09/07/the-floppy-disk-as-a-portable-music-format/).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/store-tunes-on-paper-and-stream-them-over-lora", "canonical_source": "https://hackaday.com/2026/08/18/store-tunes-on-paper-and-stream-them-over-lora/", "published_at": "2026-08-18 08:00:40+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-18 08:11:21.779554+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Makestreame", "Meta", "EnCodec", "Paper Tunes", "LoRA"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/store-tunes-on-paper-and-stream-them-over-lora", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/store-tunes-on-paper-and-stream-them-over-lora.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/store-tunes-on-paper-and-stream-them-over-lora.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/store-tunes-on-paper-and-stream-them-over-lora.jsonld"}}