Nearly one year after the release of Opus 1.2, the Opus 1.3 release is happening quite soon with Friday marking the availability of the release candidate for this open-source and versatile audio codec implementation.

Last December marked the Opus 1.3 beta while since yesterday it has officially reached the release candidate phase with RC1. The noted Opus 1.3 highlights include:

Making it possible to use SILK down to bitrates around 5 kb/s
Using wideband encoding down to 9 kb/s
Improving security (including a new –enable-hardening option)
Minor quality improvement on tones
Improving Ambisonics support (still experimental)
Minor bug fixes

More details on Opus 1.3 RC1 and downloads are available from Opus-Codec.org.