Post by mslo79 on Oct 19, 2018 4:18:39 GMT
Opus v1.3 was released on Oct 18th 2018... Opus v1.3 Info ; in short... it's the best lossy encoder for speech/music there is. this can save storage space on someones phone for example if they want to jam a bunch of music (or speech files) on it but keep the file size minimal.
NOTE: you only need one of those two downloads. I use 64bit since it's faster to encode music etc than the 32bit one is.
since I use Foobar2000 to do my general audio conversions I just extract the 'opusenc.exe' (which is in the .zip files above) to the 'Foobar2000\Encoders' folder and you can make your own Opus v1.3 files (which are lossy audio files) from your lossless audio files (i.e. FLAC/ALAC etc) etc.
I suggest 96kbps for music as I consider that the sweet spot overall in terms of sound quality/file size combo. or... no lower than 64kbps or no higher than 128kbps. although... I will say the sound quality is pretty good even at 32kbps and 48kbps considering the really low bit rate. lossy encoders have come pretty far since the early days of MP3 etc.
but with that said... 96kbps or 128kbps or 160kbps is likely where the vast majority of people will want to be for encoding music given what I have read (i.e. wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Opus#Music_encoding_quality ), which basically boils down to this...
96kbps = 'approaching transparency'
128kbps = 'Very close to transparency'
160kbps (192kbps tops) = 'Transparent with very low chance of artifacts (a few killer samples still detectable)'
NOTE: 'transparency' simply means the point which the lossy audio file (Opus/AAC/MP3 etc) sounds the same as the lossless original(FLAC/ALAC etc) to the listener.
I am confident that 96kbps would please plenty of people and it's very efficient at that bit rate to as I feel going any higher than 128kbps with Opus starts to really lose efficiency and defeats the purpose of using lossy files in the first place.
but if you want to save more storage space, 64kbps is a option and still gives solid enough sound quality overall but I would avoid going less than 64kbps as a general rule. but you can play with things and select a bit rate that sounds good enough for you.
for encoding speech... I can use as low as 13kbps with Opus v1.3 (with Opus v1.2.1, the previous release of the Opus encoder, I suggest going no lower than 14kbps). while 13kbps for speech is not totally transparent it retains a large enough portion of the speech quality at a tiny fraction of the file size.