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#silk
1 articles
01
2026-08-25
·
Audio Codecs
·
★ MEMBER
·
PAPER
·
11 min read
Why Opus Won — The Design of a Modern Audio Codec
Audio codecs used to split cleanly into speech codecs and music codecs. Opus ended the split by stacking two engines, SILK and CELT, inside a single bitstream. This piece works up from zero: how linear prediction and the MDCT divide the spectrum between them, why CELT refuses to let band energy collapse, what actually sets a codec's latency, and the technical and institutional reasons Opus became WebRTC's mandatory codec.