A maker known as Makestreme has printed an entire two-minute song onto a sheet of paper, publishing the full build and source code on Hackster.io. The trick is Meta's EnCodec neural audio codec, which crunched a 2.9MB MP3 down to roughly 21KB of latent tokens, a reduction of about 1,000 times, small enough to split across eight QR codes arranged as a double-sided "paper cassette." The same 21KB file was also beamed between two ESP32 boards over LoRa radio, and by our reading of the published transmitter code, that wireless transfer takes around 90 minutes per song.
One QR code tops out at roughly 3KB of binary data, with Makestreme hitting the practical limit at about 3.3KB, so a 2.9MB MP3 would need close to a thousand of them. Conventional compression can't close that gap because MP3 is itself already lossy, which is where EnCodec comes in.
