If you've basically ever saved a sound file, you're most likely familliar with good 'ol MP3. It's a format that's been around for so long that it's patents have expired, and is ubiquitous in the realm of online music sharing. 128Kbps is generally seen as the baseline for acceptable audio quality for casual listeners, with high bitrates (up to 320Kbps) generally only being used by people who take audio quality at least somewhat seriously. FLAC is usually the format of choice for audiophiles for it's lossless nature and capability of being used with Hi-Res audio (usually referring to audio with a much higher sampling rate and bit depth than an audio CD).
I've tried to give all the formats a best case scenario as to how they've been encoded, especially for AAC, where I used Apple's AAC encoder instead of FFMPEG's built-in encoder (the latter performs noticably worse).
| Format | Bitrate | File size | Encoder used | Encoding Options | Audio File |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FLAC | 1,182 Kbps | 1,751 KiB | FLAC CLI 1.5.0 | -8 | |
| MP3 | 117 Kbps | 184 KiB | LAME 3.100 | --abr 128 -h | |
| Vorbis | 115 Kbps | 170 KiB | oggenc2 2.8.8 | -q 4 | |
| AAC-LC | 113 Kbps | 168 KiB | Apple AAC | --tvbr 73 | |
| HE-AAC v1 | 58.8 Kbps | 89 KiB | -Apple AAC | --he --cvbr 56 | |
| Opus | 59.3 Kbps | 88 KiB | Libopus 1.5.2 | --bitrate 64 | |
| Opus | 116 Kbps | 172 KiB | Libopus 1.5.2 | --bitrate 128 |
How to use Opus
If you'd like to encode Opus files, you can use:
- The command line-encoder
- FFMPEG and most software that uses it
If you'd like to play or decode Opus, you can use:
- The official command-line decoder
- FFMPEG and most software which uses it
- MPC-HC
- VLC media player
- Basically anything on your Android phone, since Android has had native support since version 5 (Lolipop)