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Then those listeners must have been deaf, because right now, Opus is good for nothing except pure spoken word. Try encoding music with it, then try using AAC or HE-AAC (a decent AAC encoder, not FAAC) to encode the same source material. No matter the bitrate (unless you get it too high to matter) any music or other non-voice audio stream encoded via the free Opus encoder sounds like the audio is being filtered through grains of sand. Opus is a superior bitstream to AAC, but at the moment the encoder has zero psychoacoustical models to best offset the artifacts introduced by compression. Opus, at the moment, is much more of a high quality replacement for Speex than a replacement for MP3 and AAC.

Then those listeners must have been deaf, because right now, Opus is good for nothing except pure spoken word. Try encoding music with it, then try using AAC or HE-AAC (a decent AAC encoder, not FAAC) to encode the same source material. No matter the bitrate (unless you get it too high to matter) any music or other non-voice audio stream encoded via the free Opus encoder sounds like the audio is being filtered through grains of sand. Opus is a superior bitstream to AAC, but at the moment the encoder has zero psychoacoustical models to best offset the artifacts introduced by compression. Opus, at the moment, is much more of a high quality replacement for Speex than a replacement for MP3 and AAC. "

If this is so then for applications at the high quality end one should probably still choose Vorbis for use over the web. Vorbis is better than mp3 but not quite as good as AAC.

Vorbis is the choice of the Wikimedia Foundation:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home

Because it is a well-performed, open, royalty-free codec, Vorbis is the natural choice for web audio. After many years, IE still does not support audio on the web properly.

Edited 2012-11-16 01:35 UTC