ulc-codec Demonstration 20210821

Did some hard thinking on the window-switching logic and managed to improve transients. For the sake of it, I also slightly tweaked the visuals to have a bit less jitter, and removed the waitstate adjustments.

This track is encoded at 32kbps VBR, which is extremely impressive for this style of music.

ULC now supports noise-fill. Transient detection has been improved, and noise-fill allows dramatic quality improvements at lower rates.

It's been a while, and ulc-codec has made a fair bit of progress.

Although a 64kbps demo is good for showing off a codec's low-rate quality, the upload here is more meant as a demonstration of running an MDCT codec on the GBA at all. So the file has been replaced with a 128kbps copy instead.

The biggest improvement has been psychoacoustics, but transients are also somewhat improved in this version.

NOTE: This 7z file includes the resource files missing from the last release (graphics data).

The old version only had an AVX-based encoder/decoder. This new version provides SSE and x87 versions alongside the AVX one.

For this release, I decided to bundle the GBA executable's source code and the encoding/decoding executables (Windows only, sorry).
Although the source code has always been available on GitHub, it may be less annoying for users to have the source code all in one file, and including the pre-built conversion tools should also make it a lot easier to test your own files.

Transients were improved fairly dramatically over the old version, based on a research paper regarding the exact thing this codec tries to accomplish.

Transients are coded a bit better, and the quantizer selections are more optimal, leading to overall increases in quality.