AMR and Opus explained
AMR is a narrowband speech codec designed for mobile phone calls. It is optimised specifically for the frequency range of the human voice and sounds poor for anything else.
Opus is the current state of the art for lossy audio, and the codec behind most voice calls you make over the internet. It performs well across an unusually wide range, from 6 kbps speech to transparent music.
- Where AMR files come from
- Voice memos and voicemail from older phones.
- Where Opus is used
- Voice and video calls, modern podcast pipelines and WebRTC.