[kragen]

"very fast" could mean many different things that vary by orders of magnitude

in https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/04/qoa-specification he got ffmpeg on one core of an i7-6700k (which is arguably 'modern hardware') to encode a 9807-second file in mp3 in 146.2 seconds, 67× faster than real time. but qoa was 25.75 seconds, 5.7 times faster than that. qoa decoding was 2.5× as fast as dr_mp3

you can imagine situations where reducing the number of audio encoding servers in your audio encoding cluster by a factor of 6 would be a big win, or where you want to encode 100+ audio streams in real time on your laptop (maybe an sdr tuned to every am radio station at once), but i agree with you that battery-constrained devices are a more likely application area: making your audio recorder battery last twice as long is a much bigger win