Opus
The codec that beats them all at low bitrate.
Where it came from
Opus was standardized by the IETF as RFC 6716 in 2012, merging Skype's SILK (speech) and Xiph's CELT (music) codecs. The result is a single codec that excels at both conversation and concert.
It is the default for Discord, WhatsApp, and WebRTC — anywhere real-time voice matters. At 32 kbps it sounds better than MP3 at 128.
How it works
Opus switches internally between a speech model (good below 20 ms frames) and a music model, even within one stream. It scales from 6 kbps to 510 kbps with very low latency.
UWC converts Opus ↔ WAV/MP3 and more in the browser audio studio, using native decoding where available.