
Opus Interactive Audio Codec v1.1.3 released - MrZeus
http://opus-codec.com/
======
jph
I'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
If 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.

~~~
klodolph
I'm sick of the "storage is insanely cheap" refrain from FLAC proponents.

CDs are 1400 Kbit/s and FLAC might be half that at 700 Kbit/s. I have 50 GB or
so of music at 260 Kbit/s AAC. If I were to use FLAC instead, I would need 140
GB of storage. Practically speaking, for a MacBook this means going to the 512
GB storage model instead of the 256 GB storage model, which is an extra $300.
For my desktop, this means either dropping $200 on another SSD or going with
rotational storage for my music library. For my phone, this means downsizing
my library by an additional 60%, and I have already had to trim a lot of music
out. Or I could buy another phone and spend $200 to get a model with enough
storage for me. (Streaming to the phone is not always an option. I spend time
in areas without reception.)

However, since the difference between FLAC and 260 Kbit/s AAC is imperceptible
to us mere mortals, I can spend my $500-700 on something more interesting than
"insanely cheap storage", and I get to enjoy my music.

Yes, let's not have people transcode music needlessly. But stop saying that
"storage is insanely cheap" because cheap storage isn't portable.

FLAC is great for archiving music but that's not something that I do. I don't
archive music. I listen to it.

~~~
natermer
> I'm sick of the "storage is insanely cheap" refrain from FLAC proponents.

It is insanely cheap.

> Practically speaking, for a MacBook this means going to the 512 GB storage
> model instead of the 256 GB storage model, which is an extra $300.

That's really a issue related to buying and owning a Apple laptop rather then
FLAC being too big. You bought something with very limited capacity that costs
a huge amount of money to expand.

3TB drives are now about $100. That's _cheap_.

> Yes, let's not have people transcode music needlessly.

I transcode _all_the_time.

It's fun.

Why? Because my music I care about is in flac. So if I want mp3 I can have
mp3. If I want AAC I can have AAC. If I want Opus, then everything can be had
in Opus.

Some devices don't like AAC. Some don't like MP3 VBR. Many can't play Vorbis,
and very few like Opus. But none of that matters to me.

I can stream to my phone over cell network without any major expense because
now I can use Opus running at 60Kb/s to match what I used to get with MP3 at
128Kb/s

If I followed your thinking then I would have a great amount of my stuff in
256 Kb/s VBR MP3 LAME, because that was the best and most compatible
technology for a long time.

Now where would I be?

~~~
haberman
> 3TB drives are now about $100. That's _cheap_.

Cheap storage exists. Parent's point is that cheap storage isn't portable.

~~~
themihai
Online storage is not that expensive(i.e. $0.026 / GB / month). I'm not
talking about iCloud.

~~~
Natanael_L
Then you're trading size and storage cost for battery life and cellular
bandwidth cost.

~~~
kbenson
I can't help but feel the real elephant in the room here is the assumption
that it's valid to expect tens to hundreds of gigabytes of compressed audio to
be immediately accessible, and from a laptop no less.

~~~
haberman
What does "valid" mean here? If somebody wants to do that, and can do it with
lossy compression, who are you to say it's "invalid"?

And who are you to tell them they should losslessly compress, even though it
means that now they can't have what they want?

~~~
kbenson
What we have is general advice(which is correct) being countered by a someone
citing a specific situation, in which all the aspects that make the advice
non-applicable are constraints they have imposed on their self.

50 GB of music on a Macbook, which would require upgrading and this cost an
extra $300, so it's not cheap. Does everyone need a Macbook? Does everyone
need to use a laptop? Does everyone need over 17 days of music immediately
accessible? Even if it's immediately accessible, does it need to be locally
stored, or is remote access applicable?

The comment starts out with "I'm sick of the "storage is insanely cheap"
refrain from FLAC proponents." What I meant by "valid" is does it apply to the
majority of the audience the comment was aimed at, or are we hearing about
someone's self-imposed problems?

It's sort of like a discussion about driving safety, and someone suggests
using a specific high safety rated car which costs a little most, but not too
much, and someone else jumping in and complaining how they are tired of that
suggestion because the _convertible_ version of that car costs far more. While
technically correct, I would argue that the original advice probably wasn't
even aimed at that person, but at those who value safety more that having a
convertible.

Similarly, here we have someone that may care about quality, but I don't think
it's hard to argue from their statements that they care less about quality
than a few other factors, such as using an Apple product, using a laptop,
keeping their files local, and having a very large store of music. Since the
source of this stated "If you're really concerned over sound quality: use
something lossless, like FLAC." I think it's entirely valid to point out that
self imposed constraints such as the ones in this discussion are definitely
something worth looking at when someone calls the usefulness of the comment in
question.

That said, I'll fully admit I didn't express that well, and could have come
across as preachy (and maybe I still am). I just think the original comment
was worthwhile (if you care, keep your originals lossless), and didn't think
the counter was very well presented at all.

------
cpeterso
Firefox (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)

------
MrZeus
More 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
It'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)

------
anexprogrammer
I 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
> 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)

------
kregasaurusrex
The 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
Yeah, 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)

------
loudmax
I'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.

------
nfriedly
The 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.

------
corysama
How 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.

~~~
TD-Linux
It 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
JACK 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
I'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
Yeah. 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
But 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...

------
bydo
Are 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
No need. Most codecs achieve transparency at and above 128 kbps.

~~~
SSLy
with "most" excluding mp3, which does that at around 192kbps.

~~~
TylerE
Your 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
Unless you passed a well-made ABX test, it's BS.

~~~
haimez
Thank you for that Wikipedia tangent, sir.

~~~
tripzilch
HydrogenAudio 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.

------
ulam2
Whatsapp uses opus for voip, hoping to see an update soon.

~~~
dalanmiller
Is there documentation of this somewhere? I try to use WhatsApp calling as
much as I can because the sound quality is so amazing.

~~~
jhasse
When you share a voice message on Android to another app, it results in a
.opus file :)

------
mwcampbell
The "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.

~~~
rogerdpack
Yes, was it "this version" that made it better than MP3? I'd have thought the
title would say what was new. Guess not...

~~~
clouddrover
Opus 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
The 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/)

------
shmerl
So, when will Apple's browsers support Opus (in Ogg container) in the audio
tag?

------
Annatar
It'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
Lossless 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
That is clear: voice over network, I don't care about some loss of fidelity,
but for my audio collection, I absolutely do care.

------
gravypod
I 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?

~~~
Sylos
Closeness 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.

------
lnanek2
Seems 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.

~~~
ssalazar
I 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)

~~~
baq
yeah, i can't hear anything past 13.5kHz and can understand speech just fine.
can't imagine why a computer couldn't.

~~~
nullc
Opus works great for speech recognition but I wanted to point out how your
argument doesn't support the conclusion logically.

Lets imagine that human speech had a nearly unique property of having another
whole copy of the speech in the form of ultrasonic overtones at 10x the normal
frequency at a loud volume.

You couldn't hear them and yet you hear speech fine. But a computer could make
good use of the ultrasound portion-- and maybe understand speech much better
than you as a result.

This isn't how it works in reality, but it does show a flaw in your logic.

~~~
cyphar
The argument is that if a human brain can recognise speech accurately without
needing your hypotehtical ultrasonic overtones, why would a computer need
them? Not to mention that most mid-range microphones won't pick up such
overtones anyway. There isn't a flaw in their logic, you're just arguing that
there might be more information that a computer can use -- but the fact that
we don't need it leads to the conclusion that a computer doesn't _need_ it
either.

