Opus 1.3 Codec Library Nears, New Tools Release

Back in June was the first release candidate of Opus 1.3 (libopus v1.3) with this open-source audio codec allowing to use SILK down to bitrates of about 5kb/s, wideband encoding down to 9kb/s, improved security, improved Ambisonics support, and much more. Libopus 1.3 RC2 is now available along with some tooling updates.

Libopus 1.3 RC2 was released on Tuesday to fix issues with bandwidth detection, enable Ambisonics support by default, and enables security hardening by default.

Also christened were libopusenc 0.2 with support for Ambisonics mapping families 2 and 3 for this Opus encoder. The Opus-Tools 0.2 release also debuted with various encode/decode improvements, various bug fixes, opusinfo information reporting enhancements, and other updates.

Opusfile 0.11 also rounded out yesterday's releases as the library for dealing with Opus streams inside an Ogg container. Opusfile 0.11 has some security fixes, updates for GCC 9 compiler warnings, and various other improvements.

More details on these updates around the Opus royalty-free, open-source audio codec can be found at Opus-Codec.org.