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Opus Interactive Audio Codec v1.1.3 released
- MrZeus 10y agoMore info: - https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ - https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings - http://caniuse.com/#search=Opus http://caniuse.com/#search=Opus
- aorth 10y agoIt's a shame that the browser support for Opus isn't great yet. Hopefully that changes soon. I still recommend VP9 video + Vorbis audio for now. http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm
- loudmax 10y agoI've encoded audio books with Opus at 32 kbps and they sound good. I wouldn't vouch for music at such a low bitrate, but it's nice to have a set of 14 CDs only take up a quarter gigabyte on an SD card.
- ulam2 10y agoWhatsapp uses opus for voip, hoping to see an update soon.
- dalanmiller 10y agoIs there documentation of this somewhere? I try to use WhatsApp calling as much as I can because the sound quality is so amazing.
- jhasse 10y agoWhen you share a voice message on Android to another app, it results in a .opus file :)
- jph 10y agoI'm a longtime OGG Vorbis user and upgrading everything to Opus. From the FAQ: Does Opus make all those other lossy codecs obsolete? Yes. From a technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates, ...) Opus renders Speex obsolete and should also replace Vorbis and the common proprietary codecs too (e.g. AAC, MP3, ...).
- theandrewbailey 10y agoIf you're going through all your music and converting everything to Opus, don't. It's another lossy codec and you will lose more sound quality (it will sound worse). Keep what you have. If you're really concerned over sound quality: use something lossless, like FLAC. If you're concerned over space: storage is insanely cheap, and is getting cheaper.
- dangravell 10y agoSensible advice, but "user" of OGG doesn't mean "I store my gold music library" in OGG. My gold library is in FLAC but I transcode to MP3 using mp3fs for various uses.
- masklinn 10y ago> If you're concerned over space: storage is insanely cheap, and is getting cheaper. Depends on the storage context. If you want to carry a significant fraction of your music collection on a phone, lossless is not an option. Lossless is what I use for my main storage (a machine with a dozen terabytes-worth of spinning rust), but the music is converted to lossy before being synced to my laptop and phone, and I'd rather have lossy files in these contexts (whose output quality isn't exactly top-of-the-line anyway) than having to juggle external drives. In that context, converting the lossy versions of the library to OPUS (with master files remaining lossless) makes perfect sense.
- mikevm 10y agoI just use Subsonic to transcode on-the-fly and stream my FLAC files. On iOS there's play:Sub and on Android there's DSub.
- nfriedly 10y agoThe Watson speech services default to Opus, and it's a great choice - high quality for the bandwidth, fairly easy to work with, and no patent encumbrance.
- bydo 10y agoAre there any audio quality comparisons with other codecs at higher bitrates? Their chart[1] only goes to 128kbps, with a couple cited tests at 96kbps and 64kbps. 1: https://opus-codec.org/comparison/ https://opus-codec.org/comparison/
- Nekit1234007 10y agoNo need. Most codecs achieve transparency at and above 128 kbps.
- SSLy 10y agowith "most" excluding mp3, which does that at around 192kbps.
- TylerE 10y agoYour definition of transparency is obviously different from mine. I don't find even "good' codecs like AAC and Vorbis to be transparent until quite a bit higher than that - high enough that one might as well just use FLAC and be done with it.
- Daishiman 10y agoUnless you passed a well-made ABX test, it's BS.
- haimez 10y agoThank you for that Wikipedia tangent, sir.
- tripzilch 10y agoHydrogenAudio also has nice info: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ABX http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ABX , there's also some reports of actual ABX tests being done (probably by people with "golden ears"), you can find on the HydrogenAudio forums (sorry I can't provide a link right now). Plus (heh, I'm not even sure if you're reading this 11 days after, so I pinged you with an upvote to increase the odds :p) if you care about audio quality stuff and whether humans can hear it or not, highly recommend checking out this video: http://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml http://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml the guy does a great presentation, it's an enjoyable watch IMO. it's about sampling rates, bit rates and dithering, so not really about lossy compression, but it's still useful background knowledge to have, also when reasoning about lossy.
- cpeterso 10y agoFirefox (50 Nightly) just updated its copy of Opus to 1.1.3: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288091 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288091
- mwcampbell 10y agoThe "better than MP3, AAC, and Vorbis" part of the title is apparently editorializing by the submitter, because I don't find any references to any of those formats in the OP.
- MrZeus 10y agoTouché, the comparison tests are at http://opus-codec.com/comparison/ http://opus-codec.com/comparison/
- phaemon 10y agoIt's under the "Comparisons" link
- rogerdpack 10y agoYes, was it "this version" that made it better than MP3? I'd have thought the title would say what was new. Guess not...
- clouddrover 10y agoOpus has always been better than MP3. Another big benefit of Opus over AAC and MP3 is that Opus is royalty-free for all uses whereas AAC and MP3 require the payment of patent licensing fees.
- theandrewbailey 10y agoThe last of the US patents covering MP3 should expire next year. http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/ http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lnanek2 10y agoSeems really opinionated, in a bad way: > rates are internally converted to 48 kHz > only frequencies up to 20 kHz are encoded. > In particular, software developers should not use Opus Custom for 44.1 kHz support There are times when I need to not drop non-audible frequencies. Like when my microphone is on one system and my voice recognition is on another, voice recognition needs the full spectrum for accuracy. There are times when I need 44.1kHz and not 48 kHz, like on an embedded system with everything running at that and no performance left for converting or extra PCM channels for playing with different settings at once. They keep saying it is designed for the internet, but did they miss the fact that all major players now have voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana? Did they miss the fact that more and more sensors are cheap embedded throwaway IoT devices? It's like it is designed for the internet of the 90s.
- are595 10y agoGood points, but I just wanted to point out that we are only missing a 4 kHz range (20-24 kHz) as the highest frequency a 48 kHz digital signal can represent is 24 kHz (Nyquist sampling theorem). MP3s actually tend to have a worse cutoff depending on encode settings, with values from 20.5 down to 16 kHz [1]. [1] https://www.whatinterviewprep.com/prepare-for-the-interview/spectral-analysis/ https://www.whatinterviewprep.com/prepare-for-the-interview/...
- adiabatty 10y agoThey're likely thinking of people talking to people over the Internet (Skype/Mumble/Discord), not talking to machines (Siri/OK Google).
- ssalazar 10y agoI agree but > voice recognition needs the full spectrum for accuracy do you have a source for this? Voice signals are conventionally low-bandwidth; 16kHz is usually "good enough" for human-human transmission. Formant frequencies top out around 3kHz [1] and upper vocal harmonics are not really important outside musical applications. Consonants are a bit more complicated but I'd be interested to know what voice information is present above 20kHz. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant#Formants_and_phonetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant#Formants_and_phonetics
- dalanmiller 10y agoBut what's the Weissman score?
- anexprogrammer 10y agoI thought the main selling point of Opus was always low latency, so better for real time and things such as Teamspeak? I long ago stopped caring about lossy formats for music as everything is FLAC on the NAS. For audiobooks and similar squeezing another couple of percent compression just isn't worth the effort nowadays, so they can stay in whatever format they came in, preferably MP3. When you've a few TB of space it mostly doesn't matter any more.
- deno 10y ago> The format has three different modes: speech, hybrid, and CELT. The basic speech mode is pure SILK, up to 8 kHz, while the hybrid speech mode combines SILK for the speech and uses CELT for the frequency range above 8 kHz, allowing an easy fallback to pure SILK at very low bitrates. > Opus combines the speech-oriented linear predictive coding SILK algorithm, and the lower-latency, MDCT-based CELT algorithm, switching between or combining them as needed for maximum efficiency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#Features
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- makomk 10y agoThe main selling point of Opus is low latency. They just accidentally ended up with something than offered better compression and quality than the established high latency codecs as well.
- gravypod 10y agoI don't have any specialization in audio so I'd like to know how you can measure "quality" It appears in some of the graphs on the comparison page. Is that just the closeness to the original audio sample?
- astrange 10y agoYou get actual people to do listening tests for you and they subjectively rate it. There's no good way to automate it, unlike SSIM for video.
- Sylos 10y agoCloseness to the original audio sample doesn't tell you anything, really. These codecs try to drop information in such ways that it's specifically as inaudible as possible to humans. So, you could easily have an encoding which sounds worse than a different encoding, even though it's actually bitwise closer to the original. For example, humans hear very bad above 20 kHz, so you can pretty safely drop any information about sounds above that. A bad codec would keep that information around and instead drop something in the usually audable range. And then it'd sound worse, even though it's really close bitwise to the original, from all the information it didn't drop above 20 kHz. So, yeah, you actually need humans to rate the quality.
- Annatar 10y agoIt's a lossy compression, so xiph.org's free lossless audio codec is still my #1 when it comes to audio compression: https://xiph.org/flac/ https://xiph.org/flac/
- ekimekim 10y agoLossless and lossy compression have different use cases. Hell, even different kinds of lossy compression could have different use cases, for example encoding for voice vs music. Though offhand I can't think of any lossy use-case which Opus is not currently best for.
- Annatar 10y agoThat is clear: voice over network, I don't care about some loss of fidelity, but for my audio collection, I absolutely do care.
- corysama 10y agoHow is Opus decoding performance coming along compared to Vorbis? I'd love to use Opus in my mobile games (which need more simultaneous channels than the phone's one hardware decoder). But, decode perf is a serious concern. Even decoding once on load is serious business because it affects start-up time and/or frame rate hitching.
- mastax 10y agoThis mailing list post has some old numbers: http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/opus/2014-September/002706.html http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/opus/2014-September/002706.h... The "tremolo decoder" is an ARM optimized Ogg Vorbis decoder. Note this is from before 1.1.1 and 1.1.3 (above) which each contained ARM optimizations so perhaps quite a bit better?
- TD-Linux 10y agoIt is slower than Vorbis, but faster than AAC. On my 900MHz rpi2, decoding at 48khz uses about 10% of one core, so you should be alright.
- anonbanker 10y agoJACK audio transport streams are in Opus format by default. Those of us who have been playing in the audio production field have been spoiled for quite a while now.
- gglitch 10y agoI'm puzzled by this. I'll do my homework, but for the moment, are you saying JACK transcodes its input into Opus to move it around from app to app, then transcodes it again on the way out?
- anonbanker 10y agoYeah. Opus is the default transport codec, and, should you wish to transcode to mp3 or otherwise, is converted after the fact. One of the nice side effects of this is that transport streams are really low-bandwidth. If I set up a JACK master server, and, say, six slave laptops recording input, I can stream/mix over 802.11g without latency, whereas other solutions will fully saturate a gigabit switch.
- tripzilch 10y agoBut surely when I use JACK to record the audio output of VLC into Audacity (easiest way to record a short clip of what you're watching, IMHO, because you can apply a quick clean+edit immediately), it sends the audio lossless? (that is, a lossless copy of the VLC decoding of the probably lossy audio stream). Otherwise I might have to rethink that trick...
- kregasaurusrex 10y agoThe compression codecs for OPUS are fantastic. Some users in a chatroom I frequent were trying to see how the sound held up at <10kbps, and the ranges were about on par with cassette quality for songs. My favorite one we tested was Ace of Spades - Motorhead, where it sounded almost identical for a 200kb size file versus the 9mb source. I know transcoding like this frowned upon, but it was a fun experiment.
- MrZeus 10y agoYeah, Opus is known to compress noisy rock/metal-like audio pretty well, even at low bitrates. The stuff it finds harder to do is tonal content, though it assigns more bitrate to help itself out. See the Tonality Estimation section here: https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/opus/demo3.shtml https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/opus/demo3.shtml
- shmerl 10y agoSo, when will Apple's browsers support Opus (in Ogg container) in the audio tag?