The Best Audio (Codec) You Probably Haven't Heard

by Jabari Zakiya

Just about everybody who plays music has heard about (and uses) MP3 or WAV audio files. If you're into open source you probably know about (and may use) Ogg. If you're really an audiophile, you use FLAC to rip and store your music. But there's a new (since 2007) audio codec that beats all other lossy codecs, and can even give FLAC a run for its money if file size is important. It's called Opus. Here's its overview on its homepage.

Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but is also intended for storage and streaming applications. It is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 which incorporated technology from Skype's SILK codec and Xiph.Org's CELT codec.

As an IETF internet standard, Opus encoded audio plays automatically in most major modern browsers (Firefox/Tor Browser, Chrome/Chromium/Slimjet, Opera, Edge), and music players (VLC, Audacity, Clementine). For more detail, there's an extensive FAQ, https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ, and listening test examples -- https://opus-codec.org/examples/

It's available in the PCLinuxOS repos under opus-tools, which provides a command line opus encoder, opusenc, which the documentation states will encode WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg/FLAC, or raw files. To use just do: $ opusenc <filename> and a <filename.opus> file will be created in the same directory. If you're adventurous, you can play around with a host of encoding parameters to suit your fancy.

From personal experience I can attest to its compression superiority. Here is an example of file sizes that were produced encoding a WAV file with various codecs using their default settings.

Being an IETF internet standard, you probably don't realize it's what's being used by you're streaming service, or WEBRtc app, or gaming platform. There's also a site of free Opus encoded music you can listen to here, http://opus1.o1engine.com/.

If you'd like higher quality audio AND much smaller file sizes too, give Opus a try.