The Opus audio codec just got another major upgrade with the release of version 1.2 (see demo). Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, audio codec that can be used for all audio applications, from music streaming and storage to high-quality video-conferencing and VoIP. Its standardization by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2012 (RFC 6716) was a major victory for open standards. Opus is the default codec for WebRTC and is now included in all major web browsers.

This new release brings many speech and music quality improvements, especially at low bitrates. The result is that Opus can now push stereo music bitrates down to 32 kb/s and encode full-band speech down to 14 kb/s. All that is achieved while remaining fully compatible with RFC 6716. The new release also includes optimizations, new options, as well as many bug fixes. This demo shows a few of the upgrades that users and implementers will care about the most, including audio samples. For those who haven’t used Opus yet, now’s a good time to give it a try.