--- title: "A 2.9MB song becomes eight QR codes and a paper cassette" locale: "en" url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/paper-tunes-music-on-paper-en" markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/paper-tunes-music-on-paper-en.md" category: "creative" tags: ["audio", "QR code", "compression", "LoRa", "maker"] published_at: "2026-08-18T15:07:00.000Z" author: "Léa Perrin" translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/paper-tunes-music-on-paper-fr.md" --- # A 2.9MB song becomes eight QR codes and a paper cassette Paper Tunes does not really put an MP3 into a QR code. It first compresses music into a neural representation, then turns that data into a physical cartridge and an offline radio payload. A large QR code can hold a few kilobytes. A two-minute song can easily occupy several megabytes. Printing a song onto a sheet of paper therefore looks like an idea that should lose to arithmetic immediately. Makestreme starts with exactly that mismatch. In **Paper Tunes**, a 2-minute-7-second track occupies about 2.9MB as an MP3. The project then uses EnCodec to represent it much more compactly, reaching roughly 21KB in this experiment.[1](https://www.instructables.com/Paper-Tunes-Store-Music-on-Paper-and-Stream-Them-O/) Even then, one QR code is not enough. The data is split into eight chunks, printed as eight codes and assembled into a paper “cassette.”[1](https://www.instructables.com/Paper-Tunes-Store-Music-on-Paper-and-Stream-Them-O/) The object is playful. The underlying idea is better: **the project does not win by making paper store more data. It wins by deciding that the song no longer needs its old representation.** ## The QR codes do not contain the MP3 EnCodec is a neural audio codec released by Meta AI Research.[2](https://github.com/facebookresearch/encodec) Instead of preserving raw samples or the blocks of an MP3, it encodes audio into a compact discrete representation that a model can later decode back into sound. Paper Tunes pushes that property deliberately hard. Its author reports reducing the 2.9MB MP3 to about 21KB of encoded data.[1](https://www.instructables.com/Paper-Tunes-Store-Music-on-Paper-and-Stream-Them-O/) That ratio should not become a general promise for EnCodec. It is the result for this track and prototype settings, with whatever quality tradeoff those settings produce. The actual experiment asks: **how far can the representation be degraded while retaining something we still recognize as the song?** Paper enters only after that decision. That matters because the easy headline would be “a song stored in a QR code.” It is more precise to say the project first changes the song into data small enough that a handful of QR codes become plausible storage. The physical medium is almost the last step in the problem. ## Eight QR codes become a cartridge The roughly 21KB payload is divided into eight chunks. Each gets an identifier and its own QR code.[1](https://www.instructables.com/Paper-Tunes-Store-Music-on-Paper-and-Stream-Them-O/) Software can scan the codes, restore their order, reconstruct the payload and pass it to the decoder. Paper becomes storage with no electronics: no flash memory, battery or connector. The sheet obviously cannot play anything on its own. It requires a camera, reconstruction software and a model capable of decoding the representation. A traditional audio cassette carries an analog signal that a relatively simple machine can recover; Paper Tunes depends on a much heavier computing stack. That is what makes the object more interesting than nostalgia. **The storage medium is almost absurdly simple because the complexity of reading it has moved into a general-purpose computer.** A QR code is not a modern cassette. It is data taking advantage of a world already full of cameras and software that can read printed squares. ## LoRa is a second route, separate from the paper Makestreme also adds a LoRa link using two ESP32 boards and REYAX RYLR998 modules.[1](https://www.instructables.com/Paper-Tunes-Store-Music-on-Paper-and-Stream-Them-O/) One ESP32 holds the compressed data in LittleFS. The other requests the file, receives chunks by radio and passes them to a PC. A Python program reconstructs and decodes the music.[1](https://www.instructables.com/Paper-Tunes-Store-Music-on-Paper-and-Stream-Them-O/) Hackaday summarizes the build as storing tunes on paper and streaming them offline over LoRa.[3](https://hackaday.com/2026/08/18/store-tunes-on-paper-and-stream-them-over-lora/) The useful distinction is that **QR and LoRa are two different transports for the same compact representation**. That matters in offline systems. Once the payload becomes small, the channel can become much stranger. The data can be printed, sent slowly over radio, kept in tiny memory or moved over another medium that would be hopeless for megabytes. The real multiplier is not LoRa. It is the reduction that happened before transmission. ## Compression changes what a storage medium can be We often start storage design from available capacity: this card has 128GB, this network moves 100Mbit/s, this QR code holds a few kilobytes. Paper Tunes reverses the question. **What representation would make this ridiculous capacity sufficient?** Computing has a long history of that move. Games fit worlds into kilobytes by generating patterns rather than storing every detail. Audio and video codecs replace raw data with models of redundancy and perception. Here, a neural codec pushes the logic far enough that a track can be distributed as eight printed squares. The prototype is full of compromises. Audio quality is sacrificed. The decoder is vastly more complex than the medium. This is not a practical alternative to Spotify or even a USB stick. As a creative object, however, it makes one idea unusually tangible: **a new codec does not merely shrink a file. It can make storage media viable that looked absurd under the old representation.** The sheet of paper did not learn to hold more. The song learned to occupy much less. ## References 1. [Makestreme, Paper Tunes — Store Music on Paper and Stream Them Offline!, Instructables](https://www.instructables.com/Paper-Tunes-Store-Music-on-Paper-and-Stream-Them-O/) 2. [Meta AI Research, EnCodec](https://github.com/facebookresearch/encodec) 3. [Hackaday, Store Tunes On Paper And Stream Them Over LoRa, August 18, 2026](https://hackaday.com/2026/08/18/store-tunes-on-paper-and-stream-them-over-lora/)