Subjective Evaluation of Music Compressed with the ACER Codec Compared to AAC, MP3, and Uncompressed PCM

Audio data compression has revolutionised the way in which the music industry and musicians sell and distribute their products. Our previous research presented a novel codec named ACER (Audio Compression Exploiting Repetition), which achieves data reduction by exploiting irrelevancy and redundancy in musical structure whilst generally maintaining acceptable levels of noise and distortion in objective evaluations. However, previous work did not evaluate ACER using subjective listening tests, leaving a gap to demonstrate its applicability under human audio perception tests. In this paper, we present a double-blind listening test that was conducted with a range of listeners