Xiph.Org's Opus Audio Codec 1.1 Is Nearly Ready

[Adriano ML]

You know, M4A/AAC has been around for a while and has had much better compression/quality than MP3 for a long time now. For example, 96kbps he-aac with the fdk-aac encoder sounds the same as a 320kbps mp3.

The beauty of Opus is that it's a much, much simpler codec then he-aac and delivers at the very least the same quality, if not better.

[psychoticmeow]

If you're looking for a tool to convert to Opus, beets might be what you want. I spent some time a couple of months ago making sure it could use opus files, and convert to opus on import. https://github.com/sampsyo/beets/releases/tag/v1.3.1

Also, there's a mostly inactive Google+ community, we use to to track Opus news: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communit...08823502030116

Regarding Opus vs. Vorbis, there are some huge improvements to be had in audio quality, but also in resources used to decode. Opus should use less memory and cpu time.

[BlackStar]

IIRC, classical music tends to be easier to compress without ruining it.

Actually, it's the opposite. Rap/pop/rock are the easiest to compress: low dynamic range, usually mastered for portable MP3 players from the get-go. Classical has high dynamic range (see e.g. Ravel's "Bolero") and a huge variety of instruments that are hard to compress (e.g. violins, flutes, cymbals that go all the way up to the 22KHz Nyquist limit.)

Plus, people tend to be more anal about sound quality in classical recordings than, say, Lady Gaga songs (not that there is anything wrong with Lady Gaga.)

[shmerl]

How do you do that? What commands or maybe a GUI app? Afaik the mainstream GUI-based audio encoding apps don't yet support opus.

There is a standard tool - opusenc provided by the Opus project. It's included in the opus-tools package. For some reason, music encoded in Vorbis comes out in smaller sizes for me than Opus (in comparable quality). But I'm using the beta build still.

[shmerl]

Firefox already support Opus since 15, Chrome and Chromium do as well meaning both desktop and smartphones can use it.

Does Chrome support it (in the Ogg container)? It used to have hard time with it. A test: http://people.xiph.org/~giles/2012/o...lights-96.opus

[Szzz]

Just like systemD, wayland, WebP. These projects throw away (many/all) crappy/unneeded solutions and present one that fits all and is also better.

WebP, really? AFAIK it only supports 8-bit per color (24-bit per pixel). It is not enough as it causes banding artifacts because of low precision. E.g there is clear difference between rgb(15,15,15) and rgb(15,16,15). This is noticeable in smooth gradients. Moreover, they most probably use color space like sRGB which can only represent about 35% of possible colors.

[dietrdan]

I can't wait to start encoding all my music is opus. The file sizes are always less than half of the 320kbps mp3 and same/better quality.

beat you to it, already encode my 10gb music library entirely to opus

well to be exact is now my 7gb opus music library and even with classical music the sound is totally perfect, i guess opus 1.1 will just improve it even more

I hope you and others encode your music library from a lossless source to opus, i.e. wave/flac -> opus.
Please don't tell me that you transcode from a lossy source to further decrease the quality, i.e. mp3 -> opus...

How do you do that? What commands or maybe a GUI app? Afaik the mainstream GUI-based audio encoding apps don't yet support opus.

I'm surprised nobody ever heard about soundKonverter, which is the swiss army tool to me for encoding & replaygaining audio files. Of course you can encode to opus if you have the codec installed...

Yet another audio codec that doesn't work in any portable audio player....

Have you ever heard of the rockbox.org firmware? I wouldn't even buy a player which isn't supported...
Buy a cheap Sansa Clip+ player and an SD card according to your library size and you can finally enjoy your music in lossless flac without the hassle to reencode ever again

So much for most of the dangerous half-truths in the thread...

[shmerl]

I'm surprised nobody ever heard about soundKonverter, which is the swiss army tool to me for encoding & replaygaining audio files. Of course you can encode to opus if you have the codec installed...

Thanks for pointing to soundKonverter, I never saw it before - it's pretty neat. I'm used to converting with mplayer to wav from anything, and then encoding with whatever encoder is present (opusenc, oggenc etc.):

mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -ao pcm:waveheader:file='target.wav' <source_file>

Of course doing that from mp3 is pointless, since quality will be lost (other codecs optimize out other things, and the loss will be double). Unless you are just doing it for the sake of getting rid of patented formats

[xnor]

Actually, it's the opposite. Rap/pop/rock are the easiest to compress: low dynamic range, usually mastered for portable MP3 players from the get-go. Classical has high dynamic range (see e.g. Ravel's "Bolero") and a huge variety of instruments that are hard to compress (e.g. violins, flutes, cymbals that go all the way up to the 22KHz Nyquist limit.)

Nope you got that backwards. Dynamically compressed stuff is harder to compress. Just compare classical to pop/rock bitrates of lossless codecs, if you don't want to ABX lossy files of those genres.

The high dynamic range means portions of quiet audio which can be compressed better, whereas compressed stuff always pushes up to the most significant bit. Additionally, some lossy codecs have problems with peaks hitting 0 dBFS which happens all the time with dynamically compress tracks.

[stqn]

Of course doing that from mp3 is pointless, since quality will be lost (other codecs optimize out other things, and the loss will be double). Unless you are just doing it for the sake of getting rid of patented formats

Having files 3 or 4 times smaller with the same audio quality* is not pointless .

*I can?t hear the difference between a 256 kbps mp3 and the same file transcoded to vorbis q3; your mileage may vary.