[MontyCarloHall]

I wonder how well this would work for the basis of a FLAC-like lossless encoder. FLAC works by approximating the audio stream with a lossy linear predictive code, and then storing the LPC encoding and its residuals (i.e. the delta between the original signal and its lossy approximation). It turns out that LPC+residuals are a lot more amenable to lossless compression (via Huffman coding) than the raw audio signal itself. If the LPC were replaced with this neural network based encoding, would the resulting encoding+residuals also be amenable to lossless compression?

[sdenton4]

I think the main difficulty is that a neural decoder is allowed to make up lots of plausible phase information, which likely leads to pretty large L2 errors while retaining perceptual quality. So then you'll end up with large residuals even though you might only barely discern the difference perceptually.