QOA
The tiny lossy codec you can read in an afternoon.
Where it came from
QOA (Quite OK Audio) was published in 2023 by Dominic Szablewski as a reaction to codec bloat: a lossy format whose entire decoder fits in ~200 lines of C. No patents, no committees.
It targets "good enough" quality for games and tools where a 20 KB dependency beats a 2 MB one. A throwback to the era of human-readable formats.
How it works
QOA stores 16-bit PCM as small fixed-size frames of 256 samples, using a simple LMS predictor per channel. The math is modest; the whole spec fits on one page.
UWC converts QOA ↔ WAV/MP3 and more in the browser audio studio, keeping the conversion fully client-side.