Some weeks ago I heard about a new audio codec which is being developed as open source – very similar to vorbis – the previous open source approach to audio codecs.

This time it seems that they’ve got some standardization into the play so it might be more successful than vorbis was.

“Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but also intended for storage and streaming applications. It is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 which incorporated technology from Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org’s CELT codec.”

Source 1: http://www.opus-codec.org/
Source 2: http://auphonic.com/blog/2012/09/26/opus-revolutionary-open-audio-codec-podcasts-and-internet-audio/
Source 3: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716