Opus icon
Opus icon

Opus

 47 likes

Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but also intended for storage and streaming applications.

Comparison - Quality vs Bit-rate

License model

  • FreeOpen Source

Application type

Country of Origin

  • International

Platforms

  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Linux
4.8 / 5 Avg rating (6)
47likes
4comments

Features

Suggest and vote on features
  1.  Low Latency
  2.  Royalty free

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Opus News & Activities

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Recent activities

  • kitsunta1l, martijn86 and amrkhaled8181 liked Opus
    6 months ago
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Comments and Reviews

   
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Top Positive Comment
Jan Klass
Oct 28, 2023
1

Opus is incredibly versatile and its introduction was a leap in audio encoding.

Its multi-mode/configuration capabilities allow it to equally-well support low and high bitrate/data scenarios, as well as low and high latency scenarios. Various encoding options give incredible versatility and customizability to the user to their needs.

The compression ratio is leaps better than previous and proprietary codecs.

When you do audio encoding your best choices are FLAC for lossless and Opus for lossy (but inaudably lossy by your choice).

Ayoub Abedrabbo
Mar 10, 2024
0

Opus is amazing for everything, but APPLE, because they don't want to support it..

Azazel
Jan 12, 2021
1

The best codec for podcasts or any other speech-heavy content.

Apaosha
Sep 20, 2012
1

Seems to be very promising. First tests were really good. Nice compression, and excellent quality. Looking forward to it.

What is Opus?

Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but 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.

Technology

Opus can handle a wide range of audio applications, including Voice over IP, videoconferencing, in-game chat, and even remote live music performances. It can scale from low bit-rate narrowband speech to very high quality stereo music. Supported features are:

Bit-rates from 6 kb/s to 510 kb/s Sampling rates from 8 kHz (narrowband) to 48 kHz (fullband) Frame sizes from 2.5 ms to 60 ms Support for both constant bit-rate (CBR) and variable bit-rate (VBR) Audio bandwidth from narrowband to full-band Support for speech and music Support for mono and stereo Support for up to 255 channels (multistream frames) Dynamically adjustable bitrate, audio bandwidth, and frame size Good loss robustness and packet loss concealment (PLC) Floating point and fixed-point implementation

You can read the full specification, including the reference implementation, in RFC 6716.

Official Links

Opus information

  • Developed by

    IETF codec working group
  • Licensing

    Open Source and Free product.
  • Written in

  • Rating

    Average rating of 4.8
  • Alternatives

    6 alternatives listed
  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Category

Audio & Music

GitHub repository

  •  2,653 Stars
  •  686 Forks
  •  148 Open Issues
  •   Updated Jul 7, 2025 
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Our users have written 4 comments and reviews about Opus, and it has gotten 47 likes

Opus was added to AlternativeTo by Apaosha on Sep 17, 2012 and this page was last updated Apr 21, 2023.