For higher bitrate 190 - 256 Kbps AAC-LC offers 99.99% compatibility, only losing to MP3 while offering near indistinguishable audio quality all while being patent free.
Opus does shine in anything lower. I am not even aware of a codec that is as good at 128Kbps to 160Kbps range. The lower end sub 96kbps is also competitive if not the best at certain domain. But for compressing music or pre-recorded audio it is a solved problem or non-issue.
Can't really get more popular than that.
I think you meant to say, "why didn't it get more popular for _pirates_"? Because pirates are purists and prefer lossless codecs (ie, FLAC), and even when they wish to use lossy, Opus being locked to 48khz (to reduce implementation overhead for low power SoCs) kind of pisses them off, even though Opus's reference impl includes a perceptually lossless resampler (ie, equivalent to SoX VHQ, the gold standard, and better than the one in Speex).
Examples of users: Discord, Whatsapp, Jitsi, Mumble, Teamspeak, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Youtube (but not Youtube Music), in-game voice chat on both the PS4/5 era PSN network and the Xbone/XSX era Xbox network, the new Switch 2 in-game voice chat, games that use Steam's in-game voice chat (ie, TF2), all browsers (required to impl webm and webrtc), most apps on Android that have their own sound files (incl. base apps in Android itself). Windows and OSX also have native OOTB support for Opus. Some "actual" VoIP platforms use Opus. Some phone calls routed over the LTE phone network use Opus.
It is also standardized by the IETF as RFC 6716, and most for-audio SoCs support Opus natively as part of their platform SDKs.
You're not going to find anything more popular than this.
I get Opus on Youtube Music, both in Firefox on Windows and in the Android app.
MP3s don't (really) support higher than 48 kHz sample rates either, and MP3s are if anything more popular among that community.
Neither does the human ear.
While there may benefits for intermediate representations during mastering/modification, for playback higher frequencies can only ever make things worse as it increases the chance of unintentional frequencies causing distortion etc.
And for those intermediate steps any lossy compression is probably a bad idea.
Like LAME uses a low pass filter unless you explicitly disable it, even on the "insane" preset it cuts off about 20khz.
But I can still understand why mp3 is still used, if only because of compatibility and intertia of keeping a collection in a consistent format. I see the worries about file size becoming less important over time, so many people I don't don't really see an advantage to a more modern codec like Opus.
And piracy has always been more about "branding" that people seem to like to admit - many video rips were labelled DivX for years after they had already moved to other mp4 encoders. And over the years the "brand power" of various pirate groups was surprisingly large.
And I suspect that mp3 and flac were the last "big" changes that made a significant difference to many end users, so newer formats just don't have quite the same improvement to promote their own branding.
zkmon•1mo ago
[EDIT] For downvoters - I didn't mean they took the Anthropic's product name. Time direction doesn't allow that.