I just wanted to drop a quick note that JuK, the KDE music tagger/player component of the KDE Multimedia Software Compilation, now supports playback and limited metadata editing of Ogg Opus audio files.
This requires support from some underlying libraries:
- The Taglib library must support Ogg Opus audio to add the track to your JuK collection at all. At this stage JuK can’t load a file to play if Taglib doesn’t support it, even if the playback system (Phonon) would otherwise support it. Taglib also provides the metadata reading/editing so our support is only as good as that provided by Taglib. For instance, the bitrates all show as 0kbps for my current encodes. Taglib only supports Opus in git as far as I can tell, so JuK uses configuration checks to see if Taglib supports Opus. JuK will still compile if Taglib doesn’t have Opus support.
- To actually playback Opus audio, Phonon must support playback. Practically speaking this means your Phonon backend (VLC, or gstreamer, normally) must support Opus playback. Both underlying libraries already have releases (VLC 2.0.4 or later; gst-plugins-bad) supporting Opus so this shouldn’t be too hard.
One caveat is that I’m not sure what mimetype will eventually end up being used in shared-mime-data for Ogg Opus audio (probably audio/x-opus+ogg or audio/opus+ogg). At this point Ogg Opus audio gets detected as audio/ogg so I simply check for .opus extension if this fallback mimetype is identified.
In case it’s not clear from my writing “Ogg Opus” everywhere instead of just Opus, JuK currently does not support Opus audio in other container formats (such as Matroska). However the Opus standard recommends using Ogg as the container for purposes of storing audio as files so this should be how you encounter Opus files in practice.