The Icsi Audio Laboratory

A tool to aid the study of audio transmission over heterogeneous networks Summary The first part of this report documents a study into the problems involved in establishing audio communication over heterogenous, and possibly lossy, networks like the Internet. In particular, it first provides a description of the problems involved in sending audio over networks. The report then goes on to describe how other researchers have attempted to study and overcome the problems and presents other proposals for dealing with the problems. The second and third parts of this report describe the design and implementation of a new prototype tool that was created to aid the study of audio transmission over networks. This tool, the International Computer Science Institute Audio Laboratory or IAL, provides its users with a means to quickly evaluate new techniques for processing audio data. It is hoped that this tool will enable researchers to spend less time rewriting code that is irrelevant to their research and to spend more time on researching resilient coding and audio processing techniques.