EternalBox - Local Client 2, Opus Boogaloo

(This is an update to my last post which you can view here)

After *several* days of painstaking searching through reference documents and specifications, it's finally here - an encoded loop that *doesn't* take 100 MB.

That's right folks, the attached ogg audio file was generated directly with a testbench version of the EternalBox's upcoming local client. It still needs some work obviously, but this file clocks in at a measly 8 MB for 11 minutes - converting this to a wav file produces an output of around 120 MB. So with virtually no overhead (besides converting the original file to opus which, read on to find out some exciting details about that), we've created a file that's only 7% of the size!

There is a slight catch - waveform audio files enjoy support in just about everything due to the fact that they're basically just uncompressed PCM data. Opus support is... not quite there yet - it has a vast array of support, in part due to being an open format, and free reference documents/binaries being available, however it is important to keep in mind it is still limited. In these cases, work arounds may be required.

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I mentioned earlier some exciting details about Opus and it's use in the EternalBox project, and I wanted to expand on that. Some issues we ran into earlier with Vivaldi caused me to rethink a few of the choices that I had made early into the project, in particular the choice of using M4A audio files (AAC wrapped inside an MPEG-4 container) as the de-facto standard. 

While I did mention earlier that Opus is not fully supported, it is getting better (Mostly; Apple still looks like they want to be rude and play by their own rules), and I'm hopeful that support will continue to increase. I'm not 100% on whether or not I'll be using Opus as the standard - I'll need to check some analytical data before anything else - but it could be quite useful, especially since YouTube also uses Opus for a lot of their audio streams apparently, so that would be nice.