LongCat-Audio-Codec: The Speech LLM Breakthrough You Can’t Ignore

Why Do We Need a Next-Gen Audio Codec? With Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs) advancing rapidly, a critical bottleneck has emerged: how can we efficiently represent and process audio data for these models? Traditional audio codecs like OPUS or AAC weren’t designed to work seamlessly with LLMs. Their high frame rates and redundant representations are like trying to learn Chinese using an English dictionary—it’s possible, but highly inefficient. This is the very problem LongCat-Audio-Codec aims to solve. It’s not just another codec; it’s a dedicated audio tokenizer and detokenizer built for Speech LLMs. Core Innovation: Parallel Token Generation What …