Opus is a new audio codec developed by Mozilla with the online interactive chat and music streaming in the mind. Opus is much more efficient and is very flexible depending on the situation at hand. Opus can switch to a number of audio codecs depending on how much bandwidth is available to it. This is why it is ideal candidate for audio encoding for things like online chat, game chat, VoIP telephony, music streaming and so on. Through the flexibility of its operation, you will never suffer from the endless buffering problems like with some other codecs.
Even though Opus will be used internally by the various applications if they want to make use of the Opus benefits, you can also convert your WAV audio files to the OPUS format using a set of tools available from the Mozilla website. Here is how:
- First of make sure you have WAV audio files. You can either record audio into WAV files or you can convert MP3 files to WAV files using the Audacity audio editor.
- Download the Opus Tools from https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/opus/win32/ and extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP archive.
- Open the command prompt window and give the following command : opusenc.exe source.wav output.opus. Where the “source.wav” is the input WAV file that you want to convert and “output.opus” is the destination OPUS file.
- That’s it now you have OPUS audio file made from your own WAV files.
There are many more options available for these command line tools, for example, you can add metadata to the output OPUS file. You can also change the encoding options, downmix to mono, downmix to stereo, use variable bit rate, use constant bit rate and more.
The question comes how would you play this OPUS audio file? You can use the VideoLAN VLC Media Player to play OPUS file. You can also install the Opus audio codecs if you want to play these files in some other media player.