[opus] Opus now supported at Magnatune

[Ralph Giles]

On 13-09-19 11:26 PM, John Buckman wrote:

> My mistake, I didn't read the man page carefully enough, which does state this:
>> Set the genre comment field to genre. This option may be specified multiple times to tag a track with multiple overlapping genres.

No mistake. It didn't say that until yesterday afternoon. :-)

>> etc. Sadly, when I "Click to play a song" on the Magnatune page, though, it tries to use Flash (which I don't have installed).

FWIW, this does seem to work for me on Firefox nightly (on linux,
without flash). Much nicer than the old site design.

> I wasn't sure what bit rate was appropriate for "Very high quality" with opus, i.e. something that was "commonly indistinguishable from a WAV file". Any advice on that is appreciated.

That's a very hard question, as I'm sure you're aware. Of course any
lossy compression is distinguishable from the original, and results
depend a lot on the music genre. But in my rough experience:

64 kbps Opus is transparent for many samples with cheap headphones.
128 kbps Opus is transparent for almost any sample with good headphones.

I'd probably use 192 kbps Opus for 'very high quality' and the default
(96 kbps for coupled stereo) for 'high quality'.

Do you plan to offer opus versions as individual songs for download or
playlist use?

 -r