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Do you mean Ogg Vorbis? Opus is a codec for speech.

I hate pulling rank so fiercely, but I literally wrote the second (i.e. first non-reference) implementation of the Ogg container format (which Opus, Vorbis and sometimes FLAC use). I know these codecs.

Ogg Vorbis and AAC hit similar levels of quality as a 192 kbps MP3 around 160 kbps. (That actually depends a fair amount on the MP3 encoder. The LAME VBR is particularly good.)

But I have an 11 year old receiver and a 12 year old car that can't play them. Hell, even iTunes can't without third-party codec plugins. MP3s are about as universal as it gets. Being able to play my files everywhere is pretty high up on my list of concerns.

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Opus is a codec for speech.

Opus also is very good on music, better than Ogg. At higher bitrates (~160) any of the lossy codecs will do fine but Opus sounds good under 100.

https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Opus#Indicative_...

>Opus is a codec for speech.

As I understood things Xiph intended for it to replace both speex (for low-bandwidth low-latency voice) and vorbis (for medium bitrate lossy audio). Is this understanding wrong?

>Ogg Vorbis and AAC hit similar levels of quality as a 192 kbps MP3 around 160 kbps. (That actually depends a fair amount on the MP3 encoder. The LAME VBR is particularly good.)

While this is true there's a bit of nuance to add. Some people really don't like the sound of vorbis's artifacts on difficult to compress audio. Maybe it's growing up with fried mp3 recordings being common, but mp3's artifacts are less jarring.

Opus is meant to obsolete every other lossy audio compression [0]. You make a good point about hardware support, but technically it's the winner for generic use, not just speech.

[0]: https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other...

> MP3s are about as universal as it gets.

The same holds true for cassette tape decks in old cars.

> even iTunes [...]

That's Apple's policy. Personally I wouldn't use the word "even" here. It's like saying "Not even the butcher sells vegetables!".

Apart the Apple ecosystem, opus is as established as it gets. Android supports it natively since 2013(?) (Android 5.0).

So, yes, if you want TeX-like backward-compatibility, it might be a good choice.

For all others: knock knock The new millennium arrived!

P.S. I do think that I don't have the worst hearing and kind of decent listening equipment and I can nearly half the file size using opus at a comparable quality.

MP3 is indeed universal, and iTunes doesn't support FLAC. However, on my Mac there are any number of third party players that do (e.g. I have Elmedia Player at the moment), and on the Android almost every music player app supports FLAC.

I don't know about an iPhone. I assume you can find apps that support it.

I actually went digging for a bit on information about audio codecs being decoded in Qualcomm's hexagon DSP. I'm no expert but it seems like recent generations of the platform (anything post-2013 or so) don't bother with hardware decoding for audio codecs (except for in voice calling with AMR and EVS). It appears to be all software codecs for many generations now. Makes sense as even the efficiency cores on modern mobile devices are way overkill for audio.

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