Hacker News Reader

The sample 64k MP3 is 452KB, or over 1/3 of a floppy, yet is less than 57 seconds long and corresponds to a rate of 8KB/s. The fact that Opus can encode the same quality (or lack thereof...) with less than 1KB/s is amazing. To me, it sounds only slightly worse than music played over a POTS line.

View on HN

I think the author may have gone: wav -> opus -> MP3. With the MP3 bitrate chosen to ensure no further quality loss.

I don't think from the provided MP3 we can tell if that is equivalent to the encoded opus format. We would need to encode to both from wav to make that comparison

Yes, that's what I did. Opus plays in all browsers except Apple's. So I went for an mp3 bitrate which didn't degrade the sound any further.

Could you not just unpack the opus file into a pure uncrompressed .wav which I'm pretty sure all browsers will support. Or if you don't mind dropping legacy-IE support, FLAC would be an option.

Or would the extra bandwidth be enough to be a worry?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com