AI might be the buzzword for the “latest thing” in radio (and in a lot of other places) but audio codec technology’s curve over the last decade is nothing to sneeze at. Moving from analog hardware — where bandwidth and connection reliability were serious issues — to today’s powerful and reliable massively multichannel IP hardware codecs and the latest in software IP codecs where reliability is simply assumed and the channel number keeps growing.
A recent entrant for most broadcasters is soft codec developer swXtch.io. It is demoing its groundSwXtch codec software at the upcoming IBC show in Amsterdam.
According to a release, groundSwXtch “lets broadcasters and media organizations move audio in all major AoIP formats, including Ravenna, AES67 and ST 2110-30, between facilities and into the cloud over standard IP networks, including the public internet.”
Furthermore, “the application achieves this without codec hardware and without reconfiguring switches or routers to support multicast. By carrying audio in its native, uncompressed form end to end, groundSwXtch preserves bit-identical quality while removing the encode/decode latency, hardware cost and deployment complexity that come with traditional AoIP transport.”
swXtch.io CEO Brent Yates explained, “We took a different approach by asking whether broadcasters need codecs at all. If audio already exists as native AoIP and we provide an IP network that can transport it reliably, removing that encode-and-decode layer simplifies infrastructure, lowers costs and preserves the integrity of the original signal. groundSwXtch allows broadcasters to move audio exactly as it was created while making distributed production far easier to deploy and scale.”
swXtch.io will be in a meeting room, 5.MR13. That’s in Hall 5.