I'm pleased to announce that all the music on Magnatune is now downloadable in the Opus audio format.
What is Opus?
Opus is a fairly new, open source, IETF standard audio format that provides extremely high audio quality. It has been in development since 2007, by Xiph (the ogg/flac people) and Skype (it uses a modified version of Skype's encoding technology).
Currently, the most popular programs that can play Opus files are VLC and Firefox, as well as foobar2000, GStreamer and FFmpeg. Thus, it is becoming popular on Linux, and those who use the VLC audio player on all platforms, but it's also a good solution when streaming audio to Firefox users (which is something I'm looking into now).
By the way, if you've not heard of the VLC audio/video player, I highly recommend you give it a try, as it is what I use exclusively for playing video files, because (amazingly) the video quality is significantly better for me, when watching movies, than using Apple's Quicktime player. It's completely free. Check it out at http://www.videolan.org
For audio quality, we're using the Opus VBR settings, but instead of the default 96kb stereo, we're using a higher encoding level of 128kb stereo. I've been listening to Magnatune's classical music this morning encoded by Opus, and the sound quality is very, very impressive.
-john
"it uses a modified version of Skype's encoding technology"
Actually it uses a combination of evolved versions of Xiph's technology (CELT) and Skype's technology (SILK).
Will the Opus files be available for streaming? I think they would be perfect for streaming, because they are smaller than any other format (or as big as the 128k MP3s while providing better quality) and (more importantly) one can expect that future browsers will natively support Opus. That's because Opus is an IETF standard and is used in WebRTC. If browsers have to support Opus for WebRTC I guess they will also support it for the HTML5 audio element. At least that is what I hope, because then there will finally be a good modern format supported by all browsers.
Also I added download links to the Opus archives to http://greattuneplayer.jit.su/ but I can't deploy them. There is something wrong again with nodejitsu and it just won't let me deploy. :(
Posted by: panzi | September 21, 2013 at 07:06 PM
re: Will the Opus files be available for streaming? I think they would be perfect for streaming, because they are smaller than any other format (or as big as the 128k MP3s while providing better quality) and (more importantly) one can expect that future browsers will natively support Opus.
Yes, opus will be available for streaming in a few weeks. At the moment, it's just a download-by-album format, because I wanted to roll it out in stages and fix any problems as we go.
The plan is to have browsers play the most open format available, with opus being preferred, then ogg, then mp3.
I'll be redoing opus files at 192kb, to get a near-lossless audio quality, and I've been chatting on the opus developers forum, and will be adding multiple genre tags to both opus and ogg files, since both support this even though it was not well documented.
-john
Posted by: John from Magnatune | September 25, 2013 at 04:14 PM
Fantastic! Been looking forward to this happening some day. I Could do with getting around to leaning how to do cross compiling. I so I can recompile the music players for my Nano Note.
I'll have a look at the Opus mailing lists as those discussions will be helpful to me. Thanks
Posted by: Alexander Ross | October 10, 2013 at 06:26 AM
Interesting that the word loss does not appear until you read the RFC, and then it offers discussion more as a streaming concept than as an encoding concern.
Posted by: spuffler | November 06, 2013 at 03:49 PM
Any reason why the Opus files don't contain the track number tags?
Posted by: Jörg Sonnenberger | November 14, 2013 at 11:07 AM
re: Any reason why the Opus files don't contain the track number tags?
Because the opusenc program doesn't appear to support them. Here is the man page:
https://mf4.xiph.org/jenkins/view/opus/job/opus-tools/ws/man/opusenc.html
I am going to ask the opus dev group about this...
-john
Posted by: John from Magnatune | November 15, 2013 at 10:21 AM
"opusenc --comment TRACKNUMBER=1 ..." should do the trick?
Posted by: Jörg Sonnenberger | November 15, 2013 at 07:59 PM
Joerg, you are absolutely correct, and that's what the OPUS dev group told me as well.
I've modified the code, and confirmed that it works with one album I've rebuilt using VLC to play them back.
New releases will have the correct track numbers in opus format, and I'll do a rebuild soon of all opus files, so that they all have the right metadata.
Thanks!
-john
Posted by: John from Magnatune | November 17, 2013 at 02:19 PM