Opus support in DAP's & Android apps

[Blujackaal]

Since the new Q1 by shanling, Fiio M6 with neturon player. I don't see the point with AAC/Vorbis when Opus tranparent on much wider set of bit rates. Nice to have a free open codec that tranparent at 96 ~ 140kbps 99.5% of the time. Vorbis/QAAC is quite patchy some stuff needs 256 ~ 320kbps while on Opus only 1 track needed 384kbps, Lame mp3 dies the moment the song has pre echo/hard attacks like Eig.wav even at 320kbps.

Also from more looking up even at 80kbps Opus can do full 20KHz so it has no lowpass filter.

 

[Tks]

Agreed, I don't understand what's taking so long with the rest of the industry tbh..

Heck even JRiver doesn't have Opus support for some reason (they do, but not metadata, so if you import Opus files, it's all under 1 category).

 

[Blujackaal]

Agreed, I don't understand what's taking so long with the rest of the industry tbh..

Same reason why they stuck with MP3 despite AAC/Vorbis being also as good. They have no clue what there doing. The Lame encoder fanboys spent years downplaying issues when currently it performs worse at 192k ~ 320k than VBR FAAC. lol

 

[Tks]

Same reason why they stuck with MP3 despite AAC/Vorbis being also as good. They have no clue what there doing. The Lame encoder fanboys spent years downplaying issues when currently it performs worse at 192k ~ 320k than VBR FAAC. lol

Meh I think LAME is okay (though one of the surprises being MP3 V0 being better than MP3 320kbps I read a while back). And it makes sense considering how averse the world is to inertia shifts on a global level. But it's been years now. Opus has made other lossy compression seem simply outdated. The amount of space saving is just insanely good.

 

[maverickronin]

Are you guys hurting for sapce to the point where this is anything more than a mild annoyance?

 

[Tks]

Are you guys hurting for space to the point where this is anything more than a mild annoyance?

When you make mirror conversions for your entire library going into the TB's of data, it's more than mild annoyance. It's also a disappointment in the industry for dragging it's feet for a solution technically superior in virtually all facets. I don't recall how often formats that are lighter, and better performing come around in tech - it's just odd to see basic widespread use is relegated to a few big corps. Streaming audio services should make this an absolute MUST especially considering most of the world is riddled with data caps.

It's not like what's being asked of companies is to come up with bespoke hardware decoders or whatnot.. everything is already there, just get metadata handled, and you're good to go.

 

[somebodyelse]

The FUD over patent licensing should have died with Opus being accepted for WebRTC baseline, so I guess it's down to inertia. I wish it was part of the bluetooth standard, but I guess the major players have too much invested in pushing their proprietary codecs.

 

[Blujackaal]

Are you guys hurting for sapce to the point where this is anything more than a mild annoyance?

Like a another poster said other codec's being okay at 160 ~ 320kbps, The memory adds up if you got a large collection. I don't see the point using other codecs when Opus is transparent at 96kbps even on harder samples.

 

[maverickronin]

When you make mirror conversions for your entire library going into the TB's of data, it's more than mild annoyance.

Your library is several TB after conversion to V0 or similar? Impressive.

 

[Tks]

Your library is several TB after conversion to V0 or similar? Impressive.

It's actually in Opus and 320, I was too late to learning V0's better, and I haven't gotten around to doing the full conversion to V0, mainly due to holding out to Opus support in JRiver

EDIT: Oh and the 320 conversion is barely over 1TB, not TB's.

This is becoming less of a problem with higher capacity SD cards, but was a real problem a few years ago.

 

[maverickronin]

EDIT: Oh and the 320 conversion is barely over 1TB, not TB's.

Still impressive.

This is becoming less of a problem with higher capacity SD cards, but was a real problem a few years ago.

I bought a DAP with two SD card slots, but never ended up actually needing the second one.

 

[Tks]

Still impressive.



I bought a DAP with two SD card slots, but never ended up actually needing the second one.

Yeah its been quite a collection journey since the original iPod days.

Two SD cards would be a godsend. Though now that I think about it more. Its kinda dumb I wanna store it all on a single card. I should just use thr Smartlist function on Jriver and see only the albums ive played most recent and most late and just rotate whatever I need. Cant help but feel im trying to double dip my SD card as a backup storage. This is dumb of me.

 

[Berwhale]

Are you guys hurting for sapce to the point where this is anything more than a mild annoyance?

I have just over 700GB of FLAC at home, but I really don't need to carry the whole lot around with me so I have playlist in MusicBee that syncs enough to fill up the 512GB microSD in my Galaxy Note 9, this leaves plenty of space on the 512GB internal storage for Spotify and Tidal downloads.

 

[maverickronin]

I have just over 700GB of FLAC at home

If you're keeping it all lossless, then yeah, you can run out out of space easy.

In comparing lossy formats though, LAME V0 will already get you down to 1/3 to 1/4 of the space and works on everything. If someone needs to cut that in half again with Opus then they sure put my collection to shame.

 

[bennetng]

If for whatever reasons there is a need to encode a lot of files, take a look on the assembly/SIMD optimized encoders like these:

MP3:
https://tmkk.undo.jp/lame/index_e.html

Vorbis:
https://www.rarewares.org/ogg-oggenc.php
The non-generic ones.

The official Opus encoders should be optimized already, but encoding speed is still slower than the above. Decoding speed could be device specific, but in the case of DAPs/phones it may affect battery life?
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/about-flac.14760/post-460345

Most importantly, never judge lossy encoding quality by looking at spectrograms. Opus for example fills everything up to 20kHz with these methods:

It is also much harder to judge stereo separation with eyes than with ears. In general, spectrograms usually shows over 100dB of static SNR but lossy codecs often only has about 4-6 bits of SNR with over 100dB of dynamic range when encoding actual music instead of tones (e.g. when signal is -10dB, noise is -40dB, when signal is -70dB, noise is -100dB). Several dBs of subtle differences within these 4-6 bits are often represented in only tens of pixels and tens of color values in the lower part of linear scale spectrograms.

 

[julian_hughes]

Since the new Q1 by shanling, Fiio M6 with neturon player. I don't see the point with AAC/Vorbis when Opus tranparent on much wider set of bit rates. Nice to have a free open codec that tranparent at 96 ~ 140kbps 99.5% of the time. Vorbis/QAAC is quite patchy some stuff needs 256 ~ 320kbps while on Opus only 1 track needed 384kbps, Lame mp3 dies the moment the song has pre echo/hard attacks like Eig.wav even at 320kbps.

Also from more looking up even at 80kbps Opus can do full 20KHz so it has no lowpass filter.

Last time I tried Opus I was able to easily abx eig.wav just like with lame mp3 and ogg vorbis. The only lossy encoders that handled it well were the aac ones. I don't have a dog in this fight; as storage & bandwidth got and cheaper and better I gave up on maintaining a lossy version of my music collection and it's been flac exclusively for a few years (fibre broadband & 512GB microSD cards are godsent!), but in the past this issue really concerned me and I tried all kinds of encoders with normal music and with problem samples like eig and trumpets etc.

 

[Blujackaal]

Last time I tried Opus I was able to easily abx eig.wav just like with lame mp3 and ogg vorbis. The only lossy encoders that handled it well were the aac ones

AAC/Musepack are my go too's for lossy audio. Vorbis cant handle highly tonal transient without puffy wind noise & stereo crush at 90 ~ 135kbps, Opus(also vorbis) has a problem with trad instruments/synth causing it to bloat to 190 ~ 300kbps. Yet even with Lame mp3 anything that pre echo/clicky transient rich the codec dies even at 320kbps.

 

[TonioRoffo]

At, or slightly over, 320kbit, a much overlooked alternative is lossywav into FLAC, but of course, that doesn't help OP.

 

[Blujackaal]

At, or slightly over, 320kbit, a much overlooked alternative is lossywav into FLAC, but of course, that doesn't help OP.

I've tried that it only good at 512kbps with forced DNS/noise shaping to avoid the slightly fuzzy noise of it being under 8 bit. I've heard the same can be done with MP2/Musepack if fed bit rates above 320kbps it becomes a lossless codec from it being a subband/time domain based.

 

[TonioRoffo]

If anyone wants to check quality, here is eig.flac & eig.lossy.flac, which was processed by lossywav at the most extreme compression preset