[Sesse__]

Opus feels like it solved the problem of audio compression. Even if someone came out with a codec that gave same quality at half the bitrate, I don't think I would care much; I just want Opus in all my devices, everywhere. :-) It's good enough along pretty much all axes, except, of course, universal support.

[zRedShift]

If we're talking about wish-lists, encoding performance on low-power IoT devices, maybe? It has decent SIMD support on ARM/x86 and tweakable complexity settings, but if your device is weaker than an ESP32, you'll be hard-pressed to encode audio in real time, even on the lowest complexity.

The new kids on the block in the speech encoding/real time communications space (Google Lyra/Microsoft Satin) have fancy AI models, promise decent quality in ultra-low bitrates (3-6kbps), but don't look like they're any easier to run on micro controller.

[lifthrasiir]

How about Codec 2 [1]? I think it delivers a comparable performance to Lyra etc. while not using ML, and has multiple ESP32 ports already. Maybe it might be usable for less powered devices.

[1] https://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452