4 ms·

Won't believe it till I see the benchmarks. Now trying to find some links comparing to MP3 and AAC. I'd really love to find out that codecs have halved audio si

Won't believe it till I see the benchmarks. Now trying to find some links comparing to MP3 and AAC. I'd really love to find out that codecs have halved audio size in the past half decade. To be clear, I mean quality indistinguishable from an audio CD, listening to songs in the quiet living room. I am not talking good enough for a stream or a phone call, that's a much lower bar. For historic reference. Steam changed the codec for their voice chat around 2011 to something called SILK that seemed to be the parent of OPUS. It gave just enough quality to blast Ievan Polkka and Britney Spears in team fortress games and other players could recognize the song (noting it's very very low bitrate, it ain't great). By comparison, the previous encoding couldn't play songs at all, it butchered most frequencies so much that the audio was just lost.

bscphil 7y ago
> SILK that seemed to be the parent of OPUS That's right - SILK was a codec tuned for voice chat, not music. CELT is the other parent of OPUS and is tuned for music. (Opus uses a hybrid strategy that switches between codecs as necessary.) Don't just look at the benchmarks, at the bottom of the page you can click on the links and listen to a bunch of 64 kbps Opus samples. They're very, very good. And no, they aren't indistinguishable from a CD. As I said in the original comment, they're more than good enough for high quality music streaming for a video chat. > I'd really love to find out that codecs have halved audio size in the past half decade. This has happened, to my ears at least. A little over a decade ago, I could not-infrequently tell a V2 MP3 (~196 kbps) from the FLAC. Took 256 kbps (~V0) to be reliably transparent. (I think it's improved marginally since then, V2 might be transparent almost all the time now.) These days, it's quite infrequent I can tell a 128 kbps Opus file from the FLAC. And the best codecs are quite passable even at 64 kbps. Actually, Opus is "okay" even down to like 48 kbps. Try the sample here: https://people.xiph.org/~jm/opus/opus-1.2/ https://people.xiph.org/~jm/opus/opus-1.2/

bscphil 7y ago

> SILK that seemed to be the parent of OPUS That's right - SILK was a codec tuned for voice chat, not music. CELT is the other parent of OPUS and is tuned for music. (Opus uses a hybrid strategy that switches between codecs as necessary.) Don't just look at the benchmarks, at the bottom of the page you can click on the links and listen to a bunch of 64 kbps Opus samples. They're very, very good. And no, they aren't indistinguishable from a CD. As I said in the original comment, they're more than good enough for high quality music streaming for a video chat. > I'd really love to find out that codecs have halved audio size in the past half decade. This has happened, to my ears at least. A little over a decade ago, I could not-infrequently tell a V2 MP3 (~196 kbps) from the FLAC. Took 256 kbps (~V0) to be reliably transparent. (I think it's improved marginally since then, V2 might be transparent almost all the time now.) These days, it's quite infrequent I can tell a 128 kbps Opus file from the FLAC. And the best codecs are quite passable even at 64 kbps. Actually, Opus is "okay" even down to like 48 kbps. Try the sample here: https://people.xiph.org/~jm/opus/opus-1.2/ https://people.xiph.org/~jm/opus/opus-1.2/