5 ms·

Probably because it's the most commonly supported format by portable players?

shmerl 12y ago
Hard to say, for portable players I only use something that can run Rockbox and it supports Opus just fine. But the general trend now is decline of their usage altogether. With the rise of handsets and tablets portable players became more exotic, like PDAs of the past. I barely see them being used anywhere. And with general purpose mobile OSes and software media players, supporting more codecs shouldn't be an issue. When I get some music in lossless format like FLAC I encode it in Opus for regular usage.
- supercoder 12y ago
  I guess because it's better to use a format everyone has heard of rather than one no one has heard of ?
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Not really. It's like proposing to use IE6 because people "have heard of it". I wonder what people here like outdated patented codecs. It's like a lose lose in all aspects.
- theandrewbailey 12y ago
  My Rockboxed Sansa Clip crashes when I try anything in Opus. I keep FLACs in my music collection, but I encode to Vorbis for the Clip. I used to put the FLACs on there directly, but with Vorbis I can put 4x more music on it. I also need to have better hardware for FLAC to make a perceptual difference.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    It works well for me on Sansa Fuze. Are you using the latest release or Rockbox? Vorbis is OK, but Opus allows using lower bitrates for comparable quality, so it can save space and also should be more optimal for CPU utilization. An interesting test: http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm I keep FLAC for originals too, but encode in Opus for regular usage. FLAC allows reencoding in the future if anything improves, new codecs come out and so on.
    - aeroevan 12y ago
      As someone who is thinking about moving to opus for non-archival music playback, what sort of bitrate targets do you use for encoding? I know opusenc uses VBR, but as far as I can tell there is no V0 equivalent that is accepted for high quality lame (MP3) encoding.
      - shmerl 12y ago
        Until now I used to encode it with --bitrate 160 which is 160 Kbps variable bitrate. But from the test I linked above it seems to be an overkill, since 96 is already approaching encoding transparency for many people. So the optimal value can be somewhere above 96 and below 160. You can experiment for yourself, but I'd give a bit more room than your own transparency level to make it a safer bet for more people.
    - theandrewbailey 12y ago
      Yeah, latest release (3.13). I'm not too worried about saving space, since I have a 32 GB microSD card in it, and my Kickstarted 64 GB PonoPlayer should arrive before Christmas.
vetinari 12y ago
There is more to music than just portable players. My car supports only MP3s, and only up to ID3v1 tags (will not play files with ID3v2 tags). That's the reason, why I convert everything into MP3. I'm not going to change my car or it's audio system for few more years.

Hard to say, for portable players I only use something that can run Rockbox and it supports Opus just fine. But the general trend now is decline of their usage altogether. With the rise of handsets and tablets portable players became more exotic, like PDAs of the past. I barely see them being used anywhere. And with general purpose mobile OSes and software media players, supporting more codecs shouldn't be an issue. When I get some music in lossless format like FLAC I encode it in Opus for regular usage.

supercoder 12y ago
I guess because it's better to use a format everyone has heard of rather than one no one has heard of ?
- shmerl 12y ago
  Not really. It's like proposing to use IE6 because people "have heard of it". I wonder what people here like outdated patented codecs. It's like a lose lose in all aspects.
theandrewbailey 12y ago
My Rockboxed Sansa Clip crashes when I try anything in Opus. I keep FLACs in my music collection, but I encode to Vorbis for the Clip. I used to put the FLACs on there directly, but with Vorbis I can put 4x more music on it. I also need to have better hardware for FLAC to make a perceptual difference.
- shmerl 12y ago
  It works well for me on Sansa Fuze. Are you using the latest release or Rockbox? Vorbis is OK, but Opus allows using lower bitrates for comparable quality, so it can save space and also should be more optimal for CPU utilization. An interesting test: http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm I keep FLAC for originals too, but encode in Opus for regular usage. FLAC allows reencoding in the future if anything improves, new codecs come out and so on.
  - aeroevan 12y ago
    As someone who is thinking about moving to opus for non-archival music playback, what sort of bitrate targets do you use for encoding? I know opusenc uses VBR, but as far as I can tell there is no V0 equivalent that is accepted for high quality lame (MP3) encoding.
    - shmerl 12y ago
      Until now I used to encode it with --bitrate 160 which is 160 Kbps variable bitrate. But from the test I linked above it seems to be an overkill, since 96 is already approaching encoding transparency for many people. So the optimal value can be somewhere above 96 and below 160. You can experiment for yourself, but I'd give a bit more room than your own transparency level to make it a safer bet for more people.
  - theandrewbailey 12y ago
    Yeah, latest release (3.13). I'm not too worried about saving space, since I have a 32 GB microSD card in it, and my Kickstarted 64 GB PonoPlayer should arrive before Christmas.

vetinari 12y ago

There is more to music than just portable players. My car supports only MP3s, and only up to ID3v1 tags (will not play files with ID3v2 tags). That's the reason, why I convert everything into MP3. I'm not going to change my car or it's audio system for few more years.