Opus is an open source, royalty-free, highly versatile and cross-platform audio codec that is fully compliant with the Opus specification (RFC 6716) and runs on GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.
Features at a glance
Key features include support for bit-rates from 6 kb/s to 510 kb/s, support for frame sizes from 2.5 ms to 60 ms, support for sampling rates from 8 kHz (narrowband) to 48 kHz (full-band), audio bandwidth support from full-band to narrowband, frame size and bitrate support, as well as dynamically adjustable audio bandwidth.
In addition, the Opus audio codec comes with packet loss concealment and good loss robustness, fixed-point and floating point implementation, support for both variable bit-rate (VBR) and constant bit-rate (CBR), music and speech support, stereo and mono support, and supports up to 255 channels (multi-stream frames).
Getting started with the Opus
Installing the Opus audio codec on a GNU/Linux operating system is done the same way you install any other open source software, either by using the binary packages from the main software repositories of your distribution or by compiling the source package.
After installation, the codec will be automatically detected by the applications that need it. In addition, two command-line programs will be available after installation, opus_demo and opus_compare. Run them in a terminal emulator to view available options and usage examples.
Installing Opus from sources
If you decide to install the Opus codec using the latest source package, which is distributed for free as a TAR archive right here on Softpedia, download it and save it on your Home directory, open a terminal emulator and go to the location where the archive was extracted (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/opus-1.1).
Run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, and then run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system and make it available to all users on your GNU/Linux operating system. With this method, you can install Opus on both 32-bit and 64-bit computer platforms.
