Opus Interactive Audio Codec v1.1.3 released
opus-codec.com
opus-codec.com
From the FAQ: Does Opus make all those other lossy codecs obsolete? Yes. From a technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates, ...) Opus renders Speex obsolete and should also replace Vorbis and the common proprietary codecs too (e.g. AAC, MP3, ...).
CDs are 1400 Kbit/s and FLAC might be half that at 700 Kbit/s. I have 50 GB or so of music at 260 Kbit/s AAC. If I were to use FLAC instead, I would need 140 GB of storage. Practically speaking, for a MacBook this means going to the 512 GB storage model instead of the 256 GB storage model, which is an extra $300. For my desktop, this means either dropping $200 on another SSD or going with rotational storage for my music library. For my phone, this means downsizing my library by an additional 60%, and I have already had to trim a lot of music out. Or I could buy another phone and spend $200 to get a model with enough storage for me. (Streaming to the phone is not always an option. I spend time in areas without reception.)
However, since the difference between FLAC and 260 Kbit/s AAC is imperceptible to us mere mortals, I can spend my $500-700 on something more interesting than "insanely cheap storage", and I get to enjoy my music.
Yes, let's not have people transcode music needlessly. But stop saying that "storage is insanely cheap" because cheap storage isn't portable.
FLAC is great for archiving music but that's not something that I do. I don't archive music. I listen to it.
It is insanely cheap.
> Practically speaking, for a MacBook this means going to the 512 GB storage model instead of the 256 GB storage model, which is an extra $300.
That's really a issue related to buying and owning a Apple laptop rather then FLAC being too big. You bought something with very limited capacity that costs a huge amount of money to expand.
3TB drives are now about $100. That's _cheap_.
> Yes, let's not have people transcode music needlessly.
I transcode _all_the_time.
It's fun.
Why? Because my music I care about is in flac. So if I want mp3 I can have mp3. If I want AAC I can have AAC. If I want Opus, then everything can be had in Opus.
Some devices don't like AAC. Some don't like MP3 VBR. Many can't play Vorbis, and very few like Opus. But none of that matters to me.
I can stream to my phone over cell network without any major expense because now I can use Opus running at 60Kb/s to match what I used to get with MP3 at 128Kb/s
If I followed your thinking then I would have a great amount of my stuff in 256 Kb/s VBR MP3 LAME, because that was the best and most compatible technology for a long time.
Now where would I be?
Surely it must be obvious that different people have different priorities when it comes to purchasing computers? Is there something I'm missing? You want lots of storage for cheap and music encoded as FLAC. I want fast storage (PCIe flash) on a portable device with good battery life and access to my entire music library in a high-quality format.
The fact that you say transcoding is "fun"—well, I'm not sure how to respond to that, because it seems to support the point I was making—that different people have different priorities. I do not enjoy transcoding, I would rather avoid it. Perhaps because I don't enjoy it, I would make different choices. Just a thought.
The comment about converting to MP3 LAME is a bit of a bad joke. MP3 was never sonically transparent. Speaking as someone who did follow my own thinking on the matter, I only have a small handful of MP3s in my library. No other formats (including WAV, FLAC, or physical media) were available for those songs.
All the devices which I use for music playback play AAC. I consider this unlikely to change. AAC is sonically transparent, anyway, so a third generation copy of my library would be fine, if I needed to do it.
FLAC is for archiving and first-generation copies, and that's just not something I'm in the business of doing.
Cheap storage exists. Parent's point is that cheap storage isn't portable.
And who are you to tell them they should losslessly compress, even though it means that now they can't have what they want?
50 GB of music on a Macbook, which would require upgrading and this cost an extra $300, so it's not cheap. Does everyone need a Macbook? Does everyone need to use a laptop? Does everyone need over 17 days of music immediately accessible? Even if it's immediately accessible, does it need to be locally stored, or is remote access applicable?
The comment starts out with "I'm sick of the "storage is insanely cheap" refrain from FLAC proponents." What I meant by "valid" is does it apply to the majority of the audience the comment was aimed at, or are we hearing about someone's self-imposed problems?
It's sort of like a discussion about driving safety, and someone suggests using a specific high safety rated car which costs a little most, but not too much, and someone else jumping in and complaining how they are tired of that suggestion because the convertible version of that car costs far more. While technically correct, I would argue that the original advice probably wasn't even aimed at that person, but at those who value safety more that having a convertible.
Similarly, here we have someone that may care about quality, but I don't think it's hard to argue from their statements that they care less about quality than a few other factors, such as using an Apple product, using a laptop, keeping their files local, and having a very large store of music. Since the source of this stated "If you're really concerned over sound quality: use something lossless, like FLAC." I think it's entirely valid to point out that self imposed constraints such as the ones in this discussion are definitely something worth looking at when someone calls the usefulness of the comment in question.
That said, I'll fully admit I didn't express that well, and could have come across as preachy (and maybe I still am). I just think the original comment was worthwhile (if you care, keep your originals lossless), and didn't think the counter was very well presented at all.
I store my library lossless (where available) on a NAS, and then transcode to <lossy codec of the day> for portable use.
I use Beets to manage it: http://beets.io
(I'm a classical trained musician, I've worked as a recording engineer. I've used great equipment, heard pristine live music in beautiful acoustic spaces, and am totally willing to compromise to "good enough" for portable use). I archive my music in a lossless format simply because I want options later as better lossy codecs like Opus come around.
<mild flamebait>I wish Apple fans would step outside of their computing comfort zone every now and then so that they could realize just how much Apple is ripping them off in certain respects.</mild flamebait>
You're running into Apple making a mint off of you, rather than FLAC's being too large.
For the desktop, it's even cheaper. 2TB hard drive is around $100.00 - how many latte's is that? If you can afford to go out and eat a $50 meal (including tips and drinks,etc), that's about 2 meals worth... still very cheap.
Transcoding is an option you know? Keep FLACs as source, and transcode for portable usage.
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-2-5-Inch-Height-SDSSDHI...
for example this is $228 for 960 gigs and they have these kinds of sales all the time ... if that's not insanely cheap I don't know what your definition is. Note that it's twice as much storage as what you're getting from apple for $300, and speedwise you won't notice a difference unless you're doing hard core file transfers 24/7.
Or this one: $219 for 960 Gigs SSD https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019H3B6SA/ref=psdc_1292116011_t3_...
Storage prices for SSD's are literally crashing all around us if you are in North America. It doesn't make any sense for people to cover their eyes and not see.
$60 (+shipping+taxes+customs+middlemen) can be really prohibitive in a non-developed country.
That sounds very condescending to me. I think no one is advertising saving your music in FLAC on your laptop.
I save all my music (and yes, as FLAC if I can get it) to my Synology NAS on my home network. From there I can transcode it to all devices in what format suits them best and stream it to my computers/stereos while I'm home.
I'm not saying everyone should do this, it's obviously more work than just having AAC on your main/only computer. But it comes with a very high flexibility. The price tag for a Synlogoy with a 4TB drive was something like 300 Euro, not 500-700$.
oh, what a tragedy.
FLAC for archiving and as a base for new encoding seems like a reasonable middle ground.
Depends on the storage context.
If you want to carry a significant fraction of your music collection on a phone, lossless is not an option. Lossless is what I use for my main storage (a machine with a dozen terabytes-worth of spinning rust), but the music is converted to lossy before being synced to my laptop and phone, and I'd rather have lossy files in these contexts (whose output quality isn't exactly top-of-the-line anyway) than having to juggle external drives.
In that context, converting the lossy versions of the library to OPUS (with master files remaining lossless) makes perfect sense.
My gold library is in FLAC but I transcode to MP3 using mp3fs for various uses.
I'm buying music in FLAC, and store it as master copy. Then I convert it to Opus for actual playback. If better free codec will come out, I'll do the same thing, using FLAC as a source. So FLAC has its usage.
If you want good sound, treat your room. Then buy _good_ speakers or headphones. Then buy a good sound interface. And only after that should you start worrying about signal qualities above 320kbps mp3.
Given as majority of people don't actually hear the difference form the first of these steps, advice about flac is only relevant to a really small amount of people, who are not only capable of hearing the difference, but also have gone through all previous steps.
I long ago stopped caring about lossy formats for music as everything is FLAC on the NAS. For audiobooks and similar squeezing another couple of percent compression just isn't worth the effort nowadays, so they can stay in whatever format they came in, preferably MP3. When you've a few TB of space it mostly doesn't matter any more.
> Opus combines the speech-oriented linear predictive coding SILK algorithm, and the lower-latency, MDCT-based CELT algorithm, switching between or combining them as needed for maximum efficiency.
Note this is from before 1.1.1 and 1.1.3 (above) which each contained ARM optimizations so perhaps quite a bit better?
One of the nice side effects of this is that transport streams are really low-bandwidth. If I set up a JACK master server, and, say, six slave laptops recording input, I can stream/mix over 802.11g without latency, whereas other solutions will fully saturate a gigabit switch.
Otherwise I might have to rethink that trick...
Plus (heh, I'm not even sure if you're reading this 11 days after, so I pinged you with an upvote to increase the odds :p) if you care about audio quality stuff and whether humans can hear it or not, highly recommend checking out this video: http://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml the guy does a great presentation, it's an enjoyable watch IMO. it's about sampling rates, bit rates and dithering, so not really about lossy compression, but it's still useful background knowledge to have, also when reasoning about lossy.
http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/
It appears in some of the graphs on the comparison page. Is that just the closeness to the original audio sample?
So, you could easily have an encoding which sounds worse than a different encoding, even though it's actually bitwise closer to the original.
For example, humans hear very bad above 20 kHz, so you can pretty safely drop any information about sounds above that. A bad codec would keep that information around and instead drop something in the usually audable range. And then it'd sound worse, even though it's really close bitwise to the original, from all the information it didn't drop above 20 kHz.
So, yeah, you actually need humans to rate the quality.
> rates are internally converted to 48 kHz
> only frequencies up to 20 kHz are encoded.
> In particular, software developers should not use Opus Custom for 44.1 kHz support
There are times when I need to not drop non-audible frequencies. Like when my microphone is on one system and my voice recognition is on another, voice recognition needs the full spectrum for accuracy. There are times when I need 44.1kHz and not 48 kHz, like on an embedded system with everything running at that and no performance left for converting or extra PCM channels for playing with different settings at once.
They keep saying it is designed for the internet, but did they miss the fact that all major players now have voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana? Did they miss the fact that more and more sensors are cheap embedded throwaway IoT devices? It's like it is designed for the internet of the 90s.
> There are times when I need 44.1kHz and not 48 kHz, like on an embedded system with everything running at that and no performance left for converting or extra PCM channels
Unfortunately we live in an interoperable world. And there are _many_ devices running at 48kHz without the resources to resample. Your devices would be unable to interoperate.
Being "opinionated" in this way is specifically to accomplish the goal of guarenteeing interoperability in a world with cheap throwaway IoT devices.
> the fact that all major players now have voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana?
You might want to look at how these systems are sending audio...
MP3s actually tend to have a worse cutoff depending on encode settings, with values from 20.5 down to 16 kHz [1].
[1] https://www.whatinterviewprep.com/prepare-for-the-interview/...
> voice recognition needs the full spectrum for accuracy
do you have a source for this? Voice signals are conventionally low-bandwidth; 16kHz is usually "good enough" for human-human transmission. Formant frequencies top out around 3kHz [1] and upper vocal harmonics are not really important outside musical applications. Consonants are a bit more complicated but I'd be interested to know what voice information is present above 20kHz.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant#Formants_and_phonetics
Lets imagine that human speech had a nearly unique property of having another whole copy of the speech in the form of ultrasonic overtones at 10x the normal frequency at a loud volume.
You couldn't hear them and yet you hear speech fine. But a computer could make good use of the ultrasound portion-- and maybe understand speech much better than you as a result.
This isn't how it works in reality, but it does show a flaw in your logic.