LibriVox Forum

"Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but is also intended for storage and streaming applications. It is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 which incorporated technology from Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org’s CELT codec."

Opus is a high quality audio codec that outperforms MP3 in just about every way. It's great not only for streaming, but storage as well. Opus itself can sound better at 64kbps than mp3 sounds at 130kbps.

I would like to start a discussion about moving to opus, for at least streaming it would make for an excellent choice. Audio books are especially good sounding down to 32kbps allowing books to be played in areas with slow or limited connections. converting old books to opus is possible, but due to mp3 being as lossy as it is, it's not as high quality as if it was directly done in opus.

Here is a good blog to show the differences(even in 2012 it was fantastic):
https://auphonic.com/blog/2012/09/26/opus-revolutionary-open-audio-codec-podcasts-and-internet-audio/

Archive.org is the entity that hosts our audio, and they're the ones that set the formatting standards we use.

So it's probably best to raise this suggestion with them.

TriciaG wrote: ↑June 2nd, 2021, 3:13 pm Archive.org is the entity that hosts our audio, and they're the ones that set the formatting standards we use.

So it's probably best to raise this suggestion with them.

You would think an entity as big as them would want to save bandwidth and keep quality.

Archive may have a discussion running there. They have a number of forums, but that is the place to discuss it , if they don't support it we can't use it.

Anne

The other key question would be whether the devices most of our listeners use (many of whom are not particularly tech savvy) can use this format as opposed to mp3 which most devices (older and newer) can.