Opus 1.6 Released
63 points by gnafuthegreat
63 points by gnafuthegreat
I am a huge fan of Opus and have begun defaulting to it for music. I'd love to see podcasts and audiobooks adopt it in the same way YouTube has leveraged it for their audio tracks! It's a really terrific codec.
There's some joke in here along the lines of "Finally! An Opus release I can get excited about," or "I'm impressed by the state-of-the-art ML in this new Opus release" or "Much better than 4.5" but I'm too tired to figure out how to make it land.
My boss asked me to implement Opus for our VoIP system. Three weeks later I had a chatbot that could discuss telecommunications theory in exquisite detail but couldn't make a single phone call.
I didn't know you could stuff like speech enhancement at the codec level during decoding itself.
I wonder what use case cares about 24 bits but doesn't mind a lossy codec.
Off the top of my head, things like remote recording and other studio applications. With high bitrates lossy codecs are practically perfect and the bandwidth reduction and reliability improvements over PCM (or FLAC and other lossless codecs) are worth it, but you want 24 bits for recording for headroom reasons. This would make perfect sense for a hardware implementation running on a fixed-point DSP or similar processor without FPU.
Keep in mind that 24-bit PCM does not improve subjective quality in any meaningful sense over 16 bit PCM, the only thing it improves is the objective noise floor, that is, achievable dynamic range. That's why you want to use it for certain studio applications where you want a higher channel dynamic range. The use cases are not incompatible with lossy codecs, especially at higher bit rates. Meanwhile, lossy codecs naturally encode very high dynamic range without loss (just like floating point does), so even at "consumer" bit rates you can get way more than 24 bits of dynamic range out of Opus (reducing dynamic range is one of the oldest compression techniques dating back over 100 years, so every lossy codec automatically does this in some form).