20 years ago we all wanted 128Kbps MP3 Quality at half the bitrate, AAC-LC ( Yes they somehow market it that way ), MP3 Pro, HE-AAC etc. And yet 20+ years later no single Codec can produce MP3 128Kbps quality at 64Kbps.
It was hard to imagine then, but not only do we now have cheap enough storage to store more music that you will ever listen, bandwidth and Internet speed has becomes so cheap we can now afford to stream it.
So in an interesting turn of event, the major usage is now 128Kbps and above. So often I see lots of 1-2Mbps Video Files having 256Kbps AAC within it. ( Normally you would put 128Kbps Audio and save those bitrate for Video ) And bandwidth and Data are only going to be cheaper in the coming 10 years.
In terms of Standard 128Kbps bitrate and above, AAC-LC in on par with Opus. And AAC-LC is officially patent free, as all patent has expired. HE-AAC v1 will be patent free as well in 3 years time.
Unless you are doing anything that focus on sub 64Kbps, you have an Audio Codec that is not just royalty free with patent grant, but free of patents, and it is extremely good.
I hope one day we would have a decent patent free video codec too.
> So in an interesting turn of event, the major usage is now 128Kbps and above.
Do you have any statistics to underpin this weird claim?
Opus is the obvious choice for a wide range of applications that don't want transparent music reproduction and couldn't afford 128kbps if they wanted to.
Down below 6kbps where Opus can't go there's Codec 2 (down to a few hundred bits per second) but I don't see that on the Internet.
>And yet 20+ years later no single Codec can produce MP3 128Kbps quality at 64Kbps
I don't have any hard data on this, but I'm pretty sure that Opus produces better quality audio at 64 kbps than a 2000 MP3 encoder does at 128 kbps. A current version of LAME will probably be as much better than some old Fraunhofer encoder as Libopus is better than LAME.
As always with lossy audio, different codecs have different "killer samples", but here are a couple of results from experienced testers that support the assertion that Opus at 64kbps is suitable as a modern replacement for 128kbps LAME MP3:
It was hard to imagine then, but not only do we now have cheap enough storage to store more music that you will ever listen, bandwidth and Internet speed has becomes so cheap we can now afford to stream it.
So in an interesting turn of event, the major usage is now 128Kbps and above. So often I see lots of 1-2Mbps Video Files having 256Kbps AAC within it. ( Normally you would put 128Kbps Audio and save those bitrate for Video ) And bandwidth and Data are only going to be cheaper in the coming 10 years.
In terms of Standard 128Kbps bitrate and above, AAC-LC in on par with Opus. And AAC-LC is officially patent free, as all patent has expired. HE-AAC v1 will be patent free as well in 3 years time.
Unless you are doing anything that focus on sub 64Kbps, you have an Audio Codec that is not just royalty free with patent grant, but free of patents, and it is extremely good.
I hope one day we would have a decent patent free video codec too.