Choosing a lossy audio codec has become such a no brainer. Either use opus and be done with it or if for some reason opus cannot be used then use aac for compatibility with insane high bitrate for good quality without having to do research on what encoder and mode to pick.
Still having a good quality and default aac encoder is great. Though I don't get why it is mainly CBR.
[−]BoingBoomTschak · 2026-07-01 Wed 19:15 UTC ·
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Eh, I prefer Vorbis mostly because it's still competitive at transparent bitrates (esp. with Aotuv patches) and benefits from a much saner volume normalization spec (simply transfer RG 2.0 tags from the FLAC source): Xiph decided to exclude peak information from Opus' spec while adding that weird thing where album gain is stored in the format header and additional track gain in the metadata.
For replaygain purposes simply ignore the spec and use RG 2.0 tags? That works with Opus too and hardly any players support Opus R128 gain anyway. For very low spec devices Vorbis would do a bit better though. For legacy devices legacy codecs can be a better fit indeed.
But would you really store new material encoded in Vorbis just to be able to play it on an old device? Vorbis can sound fine, even at lower bitrates like 128k or 96k, but Opus would sound much better. So perhaps then use Vorbis at higher bitrates like +192k? I prefer Vorbis to Aac but at that bitrate minor intricacies of the container format become more important than the codec because audio quality wise they are near indistinguishable.
Still having a good quality and default aac encoder is great. Though I don't get why it is mainly CBR.
It also uses less battery on my Rockbox'd Clip+.
But would you really store new material encoded in Vorbis just to be able to play it on an old device? Vorbis can sound fine, even at lower bitrates like 128k or 96k, but Opus would sound much better. So perhaps then use Vorbis at higher bitrates like +192k? I prefer Vorbis to Aac but at that bitrate minor intricacies of the container format become more important than the codec because audio quality wise they are near indistinguishable.