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Opus Open-Source Lossless Audio Codec Sees Major Update with Many Improvements

Opus 1.2 adds lots of new features and enhancements

Jun 21, 2017 11:02 GMT  ·  By
Opus 1.2 released
   Opus 1.2 released

Opus, the open standard lossy audio coding format developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation has recently been updated to version 1.2, a major release that adds lots of quality improvements, several new features, and dozens of bug fixes.

Opus 1.2 is a stable release that comes about three and a half years after the 1.1 series of the codec, adding exciting changes like music and speech quality enhancements in the 32-48 kb/s and 12-20 kbit/s range respectively, much better VBR encoding for the hybrid mode, as well as SSE CELT and generic optimizations.

"The most noticeable speech quality improvements, however, come from tuning made to the hybrid mode. Hybrid mode is when SILK is used to encode speech frequencies up to 8 kHz while CELT is used to encode the remaining frequencies, from 8 to 20 kHz," reads the release notes.

CELT mode gets DTX support, SILK CBR handling improved

Opus 1.2 also features DTX support for the CELT mode, various performance improvements to SILK CBR handling, support for directly encoding packets up to 120 ms, better usage of a wider speech bandwidth, including fullband speech starting at 14 kbit/s, as well as various under the hood fixes.

But that's not all, as this major update to the Opus codec has a bunch of speed-related improvements that might interest same of you out there doing music encoding. These include optimizations for x86 (SSEx) and ARM (mostly Neon) hardware, making encoding faster even on older CPUs.

As Opus is widely used today on a large range of devices and platforms, including Google's Android and Apple's iOS mobile operating systems, as well as all major web browsers, we believe that it's imperative for these manufactures to update the codec to the latest Opus 1.2 release as soon as possible.

Those wanting to install Opus 1.2 on their personal computers can download the source tarball right now from our website for GNU/Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems. All users running Opus 1.1.5 or earlier builds are urged to update to version 1.2 immediately after reading this article.