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

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

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