Hi, any change to see support for opus encoded files?
I have here a few lossless encoded content, some from youtube, where it used as best quality audio, and some audiobooks, where i encoded to opus due to space saving. I like the format, as I can have small files, with a reasonable quality for play on my mobilphone. But it would by also nice, if I can them play at home on my audio-systems. On part would be also to stream it to my Sonos, which also don’t support this, so use roon as a converter, as it works now with high-res content.
Maybe some radiostations will also go into this in the future.
+1 for Opus support. I’ve been slowing converting my MP3s to Opus and they sound much better at 19kbps than MP3 at 320kbps. The space savings is significant (about 1/3), as is the sound. At 160kbps, Opus is considered transparent. Even as low as 64kbps, Opus sounds better than other formats.
As I understand it (see Sources below and the links contained within), Opus does not cut off frequencies at lower levels when the bitrate is reduced. You get the full range even on lower bitrates. Opus excels when compared to MP3 (especially encoding with LAME) which will cut off audio at lower frequencies as the bitrate is reduced. Note (again, based on my understanding), this only applies to full band opus, which I believe is the default setting for most Opus encoders.
And Opus is still under active development. It’s only going to get better.
Anecdotally, with a carefully set equalizer on Foobar2000, Opus at 192kbps sounds superior to any of my 320kbps MP3 files. Both the Opus and the MP3 files were created using my uncompressed FLAC library. The difference can be stark.
It’s just a shame that Roon produces such high quality sounds, but continues to ignore what is (arguably) the best lossy format available today.
(I had several links for Sources, but as a new user, I can only include 2 links. So I’ve edited my original list to include 2 Reddit links which include most of the links and discussions.)
Let’s hope this confidence in the Opus encoding will push Roon developers/deciders to have Opus encoded files recognized in our local libraries as well.
It is seriously perplexing that Roon can transcode streams to Opus but can’t actually play anything already encoded that way. This was the final straw that pushed me to cancel my Roon subscription several months ago - would gladly reconsider that decision if devs worked on this issue.
