For context, LDAC is one of the few wireless audio codecs stamped Hi-Res by the Japan Audio Society and its encoder is open source since Android 8, so you can see just how long Windows is sleeping on this. I’m excited about the incoming next gen called LC3plus, my next pair is definitely gonna have that.
LDAC is great, but simply stating that the encoder is “open source” is quite misleading (while technically correct). The codec is owned by Sony and heavily licensed. It’s a savvy business move of Sony to make the encoder free to use though, so everyone else can support their standard while charging manufacturers who want to integrate it into their headphones.
If we want a really free and open high quality codec, we should push for opus support via bluetooth
Yes… I made double sure to mention ‘encoder’ between that.
Xiph really won the lossy codec scene with Opus and I transcoded all my junk to that format. Hitting (my personal) transparency on 128k vbr is flat out impressive and it warms my heart that corpos won’t have a reason to collect taxes for basic things like audio codec. However it’s a different story with bluetooth audio codec in which I hope will change.
Same here. I’ve left myself a bit of a safety margin at 144k vbr, but having my whole library at transparent quality AND portable size is very convenient.
Though, now that opus 1.4 is out I feel a bit of anxiety whether i should re-encode everything from flac->opus1.4
Which tool do you use to re-encode everything to opus ?
I tried with ffmpeg and it works but I had many issues with covers.
I use foobar2k via wine. Yes, you may stone me. Tip: You will save heaps of space by not embedding the cover on each file, just put a cover.jpg in the albums folder, virtually any player will pick it up.
Except when streaming the file or copying a random file to another location. embedded art is pretty convenient, 500x500 is plenty large enough and doesn’t take a lot of space (~50KB)
same as @[email protected] I use foobar2000 + wine. ffmpeg is alright, but fb2k is very convenient (especially for replaygain tagging). Afterwards I usually give the files a Picard treatment to get proper tags + covers.
Check out Strawberry it’s essentially the Linux native version of foobar2000.
does it support foobar2000 plugins?
probably not, since those are windows dlls. So here’s a short list of what I’d want from a fb2k replacement:
Most alternatives I’ve tried can’t even deliver on half of those.
Use opusenc directly. It preserves covers and the CLI is literally
opusenc --bitrate B INPUT OUTPUT.I also prefer 144k vbr, glad to see I’m not alone.
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Because 75MB an album is better than 400MB when you’re trying to pack them on a mobile device. Flac is for archival.
Totally get this, but doesn’t it just matter less over time? 400 megs in my pocket would have been unthinkable some years ago, but now that I’ve got a 500GB SD card, I care a lot less (and thus, why transcode)?
And data storage is always getting cheaper, not the other way around.
Transcoding to a (for them) transparent lossy result is perfectly fine if all you do is listen. I couldn’t care less about “audio qualities” that I cannot hear.
flac on pc, opus on phone. saves storage space
Isn’t the new default codec in BLE Audio LC3 free and open and high quality? And it’s required for BLE Audio support, so there will be more and more devices that support it.
LC3 is default and open, but not high quality LC3Plus is however it has a royalty (albiet very cheap)
LC3plus isn’t really HiFi. It’s designed to be low-complexity & low energy: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,122575.0.html
LC3Plus is more then sufficient for transparent audio at the typical rates you will achieve with bluetooth, 160k is really low and you can normally sustain around 300-600kbps which is more then sufficient for LC3Plus. this test is IMO flawed for the intents and purposes for bluetooth audio
EDIT: LC3Plus caps at 512kbps, I cant remeber if that is before or after FEC (forwards error correction, not to be mistaken with PLC, Packet Loss concealment, FEC is kinda like raid, PLC hides dropped data)
PS. Opus Bluetooth is already supported for pipewire->pipewire BT. AAC-LC which is commonly used is fully open source now so thats a good option