[bellahunny345]

hi,why are the voice notes i receive on whatsapp are in opus format and when i go to replay it from file manager it says unable to open PTT-(name of file).opus.this has never happened before.is there anyway to correct this?thanks

[dkonigsberg_wa]

The specific format we are now using for voice messages is ogg/opus. We made this switch because we needed a common audio format for voice notes that we could control the creation and playback of on all our platforms. (The more common voice note codecs we previously used, AAC and AMR, had too many platform-specific issues.)
This change was necessary because, due to end-to-end encryption, we are no longer able to transcode media files being sent between phones.

It is true that most media players cannot play these files out of the box. However, in testing, we did find that if you copy the file to one named ".ogg", then Neutron Media Player could be made to play it. VLC (on the desktop) can also play these files. Its possibly others can to, if they don't depend on the device's built-in media playback libraries.

[bellahunny345]

"However, in testing, we did find that if you copy the file to one named ".ogg", then Neutron Media Player could be made to play it". -Not sure what you are saying here.Can you clear this up please?

[DrBoomBotz]

"However, in testing, we did find that if you copy the file to one named ".ogg", then Neutron Media Player could be made to play it". -Not sure what you are saying here.Can you clear this up please?

All clients must use the same codec(opus) because WhatsApp can't convert from one codec to another in the cloud anymore. They can't convert in the middle because the audio is now encrypted by the sender and decrypted by the receiver so WhatsApp can't decrypt it even if they wanted to. Hope that is clear.

[crowning73]

What app is available to listen to these opus files straight out of the box (I mean when I click on them and use "open with" function) instead of renaming or doing other sorts of modifications each time.

[Troy Tiscareno]

Some background:

Generally, audio and video files are really several parts:

- a "container" (a filetype with a specific structure: examples would be AVI, MPG, MOV, MP3, OGG, FLV, etc.)
- and "contents", which may be audio and/or video information that has been encoded using various CODECs (a CODEC is an enCOder/DECoder). The audio and video will use different CODECs, but many containers (and players) only support certain CODECs within certain container types.

So OGG is a container type, and specifically an open-source, license-free container. Originally it was used for video also, but for the last decade, it's been standardized as an audio-only container. It can contain audio in several formats.

OPUS is an encoding format (similar to MPEG 1 Layer 3 which we commonly use in MP3s, or like ACC) and is a successor to the open-source Vorbus CODEC. Like MP3, it is lossy (some audio data is lost during the conversion, but the filesize is far smaller), but it is optimized to work well - and fast - on low-powered mobile devices.

Unfortunately, OPUS and OGG don't enjoy wide support by mainstream apps, or the public in general. It will take some work to find apps that support them. As WhatsApp has pointed out, the advantage is that this format can be made to work on any platform by developers, so an app like WhatsApp, which has to function on iOS, Android, BB10, WinPhone, Symbian, etc. needed a free format that worked on all platforms.

[crowning73]

Unfortunately, OPUS and OGG don't enjoy wide support by mainstream apps, or the public in general. It will take some work to find apps that support them.

Right. Ok.
so you guys when 'regularly' cleaning up trash on the phone, how do you decide which audio file to delete and which (for some weird reason) not to delete if you can't listen to them?