Opus 1.6 Released – Interactive Audio Codec | Hacker News Reader

Opus 1.6 Released – Interactive Audio Codec

opus-codec.org

88 pointsledoge19 comments

I use it for my music files and audio books as it is smaller than mp3. In average it was around 1/3 less space used, I think. I do not hear a difference, but just to make sure I usually convert from the highest available format available, often FLAC, to opus using ffmpegs default settings. No regrets so far. Doing this for a few years now.

I encode parts of my FLAC music collection to 96kbit Opus for the mp3 player that I use in my car, or just walking around. Cars and cities are noisy, and the earbuds I use aren't great, so I'm not concerned too much about the quality I'm leaving on the table, but it's good enough and the space savings are awesome.

At first it sounded like a downgrade, but upon further investigation it looks fine.

Never understood why it didn't get more popular.

Opus is the most used codec on the planet, currently.

Can't really get more popular than that.

I think you meant to say, "why didn't it get more popular for _pirates_"? Because pirates are purists and prefer lossless codecs (ie, FLAC), and even when they wish to use lossy, Opus being locked to 48khz (to reduce implementation overhead for low power SoCs) kind of pisses them off, even though Opus's reference impl includes a perceptually lossless resampler (ie, equivalent to SoX VHQ, the gold standard, and better than the one in Speex).

Examples of users: Discord, Whatsapp, Jitsi, Mumble, Teamspeak, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Youtube (but not Youtube Music), in-game voice chat on both the PS4/5 era PSN network and the Xbone/XSX era Xbox network, the new Switch 2 in-game voice chat, games that use Steam's in-game voice chat (ie, TF2), all browsers (required to impl webm and webrtc), most apps on Android that have their own sound files (incl. base apps in Android itself). Windows and OSX also have native OOTB support for Opus. Some "actual" VoIP platforms use Opus. Some phone calls routed over the LTE phone network use Opus.

It is also standardized by the IETF as RFC 6716, and most for-audio SoCs support Opus natively as part of their platform SDKs.

You're not going to find anything more popular than this.

> I think you meant to say, "why didn't it get more popular for _pirates_"? Because pirates are purists and prefer lossless codecs (ie, FLAC), and even when they wish to use lossy, Opus being locked to 48khz (to reduce implementation overhead for low power SoCs) kind of pisses them off, even though Opus's reference impl includes a perceptually lossless resampler (ie, equivalent to SoX VHQ, the gold standard, and better than the one in Speex).

MP3s don't (really) support higher than 48 kHz sample rates either, and MP3s are if anything more popular among that community.

> MP3s don't (really) support higher than 48 kHz sample rates

Neither does the human ear.

While there may benefits for intermediate representations during mastering/modification, for playback higher frequencies can only ever make things worse as it increases the chance of unintentional frequencies causing distortion etc.

And for those intermediate steps any lossy compression is probably a bad idea.

I agree with you, I’m just noting that this argument doesn’t hold because pirates (who listen, they don’t do mastering) basically only care about flac or mp3s. And mp3s are limited to 48k.

Arguably most MP3s are limited lower than 48k, depending on the implementation.

Like LAME uses a low pass filter unless you explicitly disable it, even on the "insane" preset it cuts off about 20khz.

But I can still understand why mp3 is still used, if only because of compatibility and intertia of keeping a collection in a consistent format. I see the worries about file size becoming less important over time, so many people I don't don't really see an advantage to a more modern codec like Opus.

And piracy has always been more about "branding" that people seem to like to admit - many video rips were labelled DivX for years after they had already moved to other mp4 encoders. And over the years the "brand power" of various pirate groups was surprisingly large.

And I suspect that mp3 and flac were the last "big" changes that made a significant difference to many end users, so newer formats just don't have quite the same improvement to promote their own branding.

> Youtube (but not Youtube Music)

I get Opus on Youtube Music, both in Firefox on Windows and in the Android app.

Nice. That's a welcome change.

He's maybe referring to the fact that platforms such as Spotify, Tidal etc. doesn't offer music in Opus format - high quality while conserving bandwidth and storage. Instead they try to win the market using "master" or "lossless" quality, which is pretty much b.s.

But it is popular! YouTube's preferred format uses opus for most, if not all, videos upload in the last ~5 years (they also offer an AAC option alongside it). Several VoIP services use opus, including Zoom, Discord, FB Messenger, and WhatsApp (until recently). Opus is part of WebRTC and thus implicitly available for audio/video conferencing software that runs in the browser. And if you look up what audio enthusiasts recommend you use to encode your lossless music for smaller file sizes, it's almost always opus!

Perhaps you meant lossy? Everything I'm seeing says that Opus does not support lossless.

I believe they meant saving space by converting a lossless collection to a good lossy format like Opus.

We have got to the point where we can afford to stream Lossless Audio file already. ( And then lossy re-encoded on the fly to our wireless earphone )

For higher bitrate 190 - 256 Kbps AAC-LC offers 99.99% compatibility, only losing to MP3 while offering near indistinguishable audio quality all while being patent free.

Opus does shine in anything lower. I am not even aware of a codec that is as good at 128Kbps to 160Kbps range. The lower end sub 96kbps is also competitive if not the best at certain domain. But for compressing music or pre-recorded audio it is a solved problem or non-issue.

Good sounding product names are in short supply.

[EDIT] For downvoters - I didn't mean they took the Anthropic's product name. Time direction doesn't allow that.

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