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Comment by sprash | Hacker News Reader

This reduces the bitrate by about 3 times. Even at the lowest bitrate at about 300 kbps I can't even hear the slightest difference to the original. Impressive, but I wonder what it would sound like when you reduce the bitrate even further. Would it be competitive with mp3?

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I mean, you don't need flac to have audio quality where people can't distinguish in double blind test. Something like 160kbps (iirc, ±30) Opus does the job as well.

(Mp3 is way less efficient and depending on the encoder it can have characteristic artifacts. Vorbis was already better, but opus blows that away. Software support for opus is nearly as good as mp3 since recently. We should either stop considering mp3 the default lossy format or hack it into a container format so audio files can have opus inside while carrying the familiar mp3 extension for the 90s folk to be happy about.)

Ogg was merely a (very bad) container, you're probably thinking about Vorbis.

Ah yes, I keep mixing those up. Edited, thanks.

This at 300kbps vs opus 300kbps? mp3 is not a good comparison target

Since the decoder complexity of flac is much lower than that of opus LossyWAV easily wins this competition at 300 kbps. I just wonder what the compression artifacts with LossyWAV would sound like if you push the bitrate down further (like e.g. 128 kbps). Sadly the command line tool does not allow that.

Would be interesting. Unlikely to work out though. On other note, opus 128 kbps is transparent (in my tests i can distinguish 100kbps files at most), with safety margin 256 kbps should be enough for all practical purposes (except archiving).

There are other worser codecs around, e.g. LDAC (best Bluetooth codec) 660kbps vs 990kbps is very noticable (cant setup the same way to compare 990kbps LDAC vs 128kbps opus)

What are you doing with it that opus decoding complexity is any kind of barrier?

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