TwinVQ (transform-domain weighted interleaved vector quantization) is an audio compression technique developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT). Vector quantization is a classical Quantization technique from Signal processing which allows the modeling of probability density functions by the distribution of commonly known as NTT, is a telephone company that dominates the Telecommunication market in Japan. The compression technique has been used in both standardized and proprietary designs.
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TwinVQ in MPEG-4
In the context of the MPEG-4 audio (MPEG-4 Part 3), TwinVQ is an audio codec optimized for audio coding at ultra low bitrates around 8 kbit/s. MPEG-4 is a collection of methods defining compression of audio and visual (AV digital data MPEG-4 is a suite of standards which has many "parts" where each part standardizes various entities related to multimedia such as audio A codec is a device or program capable of encoding and/or decoding a Digital Data stream or signal.
TwinVQ is one of the object types defined in MPEG-4 Audio version 1. This object type is based on a general audio transform coding scheme which is integrated with the AAC coding frame work, a spectral flattening module, and a weighted interleave vector quantization module. This scheme reportedly has high coding gain for low bit rate and potential robustness against channel errors and packet loss, since it does not use any variable length coding and adaptive bit allocation. It supports bitrate scalability, both by means of layered TwinVQ coding and in combination with the scalable AAC.
Note that some commercialized products such as Metasound (Voxware), SoundVQ (Yamaha), and SolidAudio (Hagiwara) are also based on the TwinVQ technology, but the configurations are different from the MPEG-4 TwinVQ.
TwinVQ as a proprietary audio format
A proprietary audio compression format called TwinVQ was developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and marketed by Yamaha under the name SoundVQ. The word proprietary indicates that a party or proprietor exercises private Ownership, control or use over an item of Property. For processes which reduce the amount of time it takes to listen to and understand a recording see Time-compressed speech. commonly known as NTT, is a telephone company that dominates the Telecommunication market in Japan. Its file extension is . vqf.
TwinVQ uses Twin vector quantization. In Data compression, twin vector quantization is related to Vector quantization, but the speed of the quantization is doubled by the secondary vector analyzer The proprietary TwinVQ codec supports constant bit rate encoding at 80, 96, 112, 128, 160 and 192 kbit/s. In Telecommunications and Computing, bitrate (sometimes written bit rate, data rate or as a Variable R or f b In Communications a code is a rule for converting a piece of Information (for example a letter, Word, Phrase, or It was claimed that TwinVQ files are about 30 to 35% smaller than MP3 files of adequate quality. MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a Digital audio encoding format using a form of Lossy data compression For example, a 96 kbit/s TwinVQ file allegedly has roughly the same quality as a 128 kbit/s MP3 file. The higher quality is achieved at the cost of higher processor usage.
Yamaha marketed TwinVQ as an alternative to MP3, but the format never became very popular. This could be attributed to the proprietary nature of the format -- third party software was scarce and there was no hardware support. Also the encoding was extremely slow and there was not much music available in TwinVQ format. As other MP3 alternatives emerged, TwinVQ quickly became obsolete.
Software support
Some software still supports TwinVQ. NTT still maintains a website which offers its own player and encoder for download, old versions of Nero Burning ROM were able to encode to TwinVQ, and Winamp supports TwinVQ playback via a plugin[1]. Nero Burning ROM, commonly called just Nero, is a popular optical disc authoring program for Microsoft Windows and Linux by Nero AG Winamp is a proprietary media player written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of Time Warner. Some other software that supports TwinVQ but no longer is maintained includes Yamaha's encoder and player and K-Jöfol audio player.
If you are using GNU/Linux or similar system, your best shot is to get the XMMS plugin.
Some CD-ripping software also supports encoding . vqf files, for instance FairStars CD Ripper.
External links
Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic