Audio and Music

Audio and Music Quality Metrics: Predicting the quality of encoded audio

Streaming services seek to optimise their use of bandwidth across audio and visual channels to maximise the quality of experience for users. This letter evaluates whether objective quality metrics can predict the audio quality for music encoded at low bitrates by comparing objective predictions with results from listener tests. Three objective metrics were benchmarked: PEAQ, POLQA and VISQOLAudio. The results demonstrate objective metrics designed for speech quality assessment have a strong potential for quality assessment of low bitrate audio codecs.

The latest version of ViSQOL (v3) is now available as a Google maintained repository at:
A matlab implementation (v2) is also available:
(Contains the Matlab code for ViSQOL and ViSQOLAudio) and email resources-visqol [a] mee.tcd.ie with “visqol password” as the subject to retrieve password of zip file.

Please cite the following paper(s) in any publications where you use the metric for Audio and Music:

[1] A. Hines, E. Gillen, D. Kelly, J. Skoglund, A. Kokaram, N. Harte. ViSQOLAudio: An Objective Audio Quality Metric for Low Bitrate Codecs. J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 137 (6), pp. EL-449-EL455, June 2015

[2] C. Sloan, D. Kelly, A.C. Kokaram, N. Harte, A. Hines. Objective Assessment of Perceptual Audio Quality using ViSQOLAudio. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, 2017

Related Paper evaluating the quality of encoded audio over headphones and speakers:

A. Hines, E. Gillen, J. Skoglund, D. Kelly, A. Kokaram, N. Harte. Perceived Audio Quality for Streaming Stereo Music. In ACM Multimedia, Orlando, FL, USA, 2014.