Ableton Forum

Has there been any discussions on opus fileformat support?

Opus is best and most modern lossy codec.

With opus you can use bitrate as low as 64kbps for pretty good stereo quality and 32kbps for good quality mono speech. It is making all lossless codecs before it (mp3, aac, ogg vorbis) obsolete. With possible exception of some format of HE-AAC which is unlikely to become common because it is patent protected. Opus is royalty-free/open source (for those that didn't know). And large portion of internet (e.g. youtube) is using it already.



How would this benefit Ableton users?

export/render:

- when you render the full-quality flac or wav you could also have ability to make simultaneous render to opus (e.g. 64kbps, 96kbps or 128kbps) which makes much faster to share the tune to friends or upload to soundcloud. This would be particularly beneficial when rendering long sets (1hour more) such as mixtapes or such.

importing opus:

- while in general audiophiles would use lossless source material there are some use cases. For example if you are recording long interviews and want to edit them with Ableton. Or simply using sounds for whom lossless quality is not paramount

opus in simpler/sample libraries:

- this is least important application but if you have sample libraries that you use rarely and have limited space on harddrive (like on laptop) shrinking them to opus would be appealing.

2012 is not modern. Good, yes. Best? Debatable.

Opus isn't making the other formats obsolete, as it isn't widely used.
Not all media apps and DAWs can use the Opus format. Ableton Live can't. Other DAWS like Reaper and Bitwig can. It would be nice if Live could also load these .opus files.

Rendering would not be faster as everything is rendered as PCM first anyway. Encoding to .opus would be a second step, as is currently the case with .mp3.

Not only audiophiles desire lossless material. Most people using a DAW prefer WAV/AIFF over MP3 or OGG.

Ableton Live decodes everything to WAV files, which takes time and resources (CPU, disk space). So loading a lengthy interview takes a while, and in the end, you're still editing a WAV file. However, it is now of lower quality than if you had recorded it in WAV format.

The same decoding happens when opening rarely used sample libraries. You probably want the best quality, and not a converted lossy format.
Disk space is relatively inexpensive nowadays, so there's hardly a reason to compress anything, regardless of the method.