Opus 1.3 Released
people.xiph.org
people.xiph.org
The new Opus encoder is incredible. We used the beta of 1.3 in a bandwidth constrained environment recently and found that in our testing (and for our very specific set of audio, YMMV, past performance not indicative of future blah blah blah), nobody could reliably distinguish between an AAC at 128kbps and an Opus file at 64kbps. If we tried really hard, we thought we could identify some extra aliasing in the top end, but this was not practically relevant and never picked up by our user testing. The audio in question was a mixture of speech and quiet music; of course the different encoders were easily identified when using regular high-density pop music!
The files were fully supported by every Android device we had available for testing.
Very impressive work, thank you Xiph!
All of the comparisons are amazing, but I'm most impressed by the SILK improvements at 9kb/s. The sample is just barely noticeably worse than the reference with 1.3, and artifact-ridden with 1.2 and prior.
Opus 1.3 at 9kb/s and above is perfectly readable, and unnoticeable aside from some sibilants for voice, that's spectacular.
Great job Xiph!
We're now at the stage where 96 kb/s stereo audio is reliably transparent, with the occasional quirky sample that might require 128 kb/s or 140 kb/s for full transparency. That's a remarkable achievement. I applaud the Opus team for their hard work.
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Good read: http://dafoster.net/articles/2015/03/14/semantic-versioning-...
If you could break compatibility, what would you change and why?
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