Anux Another thing which impressed me when I experimented with Opus back in the days when it was fairly new was it's resistance to generation loss. AAC and Vorbis are pretty great when encoding music at decent bitrate (~160kbit or more) from the master or a lossless copy of the master, but when encoding from a lossy source then quality quickly degrades. In my experiments, AAC and Vorbis ended up a garbled mess after some 4-6 encoding passes. Basically, the compression artifacts are pretty much the same each pass which means they amplify themselves every time. Opus uses some trickery to add entropy to the compression artifacts so they don't end up amplifying as much during re-encoding, and I was able to re-encode a music test file more than a dozen times without all that much quality degradation. Quite impressive.
I still stick to Vorbis for my music library though, mostly because it's tried and tested, I always convert from a lossless source, and also because Opus doesn't support 44.1Khz. The latter is not a huge deal with high quality resampling easily available, and even built into the encoder itself for convenience, but it is a compromise they made due to their main focus being on web communication rather than music and such.
I still stick to Vorbis for my music library though, mostly because it's tried and tested, I always convert from a lossless source, and also because Opus doesn't support 44.1Khz. The latter is not a huge deal with high quality resampling easily available, and even built into the encoder itself for convenience, but it is a compromise they made due to their main focus being on web communication rather than music and such.
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