How to play xiph.org audio codecs in iPhone/iOS?

Question

I have music encoded in Vorbis format and also starded encoding some of my albums to the new Opus format. Is there a way I can copy and play them to my iPhone ? xiph.org wiki page states about vorbis support, that in the free software side, it's "work in progress", while it cites a radio stream and a video application that have Vorbis support, but what about audio support ?

To summarize the requirements:

• Vorbis support
• Opus support
• some way to copy or make the album available
• free software would be a plus, since proprietary software could be slow to adopt Opus and I could even add support for additional codecs myself by writing patches

[Edit: essential media player features required]

• Playlist support, etc.
• Flawless playback must be a strong guideline (for example, some players have audio decoding glitches every 5 minutes played)

http://wiki.xiph.org/Vorbis_Software_Players#iPhone

Strephonn

Answer 1

Capriccio music player for IOS supports FLAC, APE, WV, MPC, WAV, M4A, MP3, OGG, AIFF, CAF, MID, OPUS

I've used it on all my IOS devices (including iPad 2/3/Air and iPhone 4 & 6) with FLAC encoded music and never experienced audio glitches.

Pyrrolidine

This one looks like a link only answer, can you provide more info please ? – Cissy

Successfully using Capriccio for the last one to two years – Strephonn

Answer 2

Open source licensing on iOS is a difficult matter. VLC for iOS plays Opus and Vorbis. But as a music player it's quite useless.

Inquietude

Notice that the issues described in the reference are related to the more strict LGPL license. Current implementations of both libvorbis and libopus are BSD licensed and are in a similar class to Apache licenses. There's no problem using them and that can be seen in VLC usage. – Strephonn

Answer 3

Since iOS 11 it supports native Opus streams, however you still need to encapsulate them in CAF format. For apps (and even in Safari) you might try to pass that CAF stuff with the audio/aac mimetype and should work.

Try with the afconvert available in macOS with something like this:

afconvert input.wav -f caff -d opus -b 32000 output.caf

There is a test site to try CAF in your Safari browser.

Source: https://hetzel.net/2017-06-12/ios-11-opus-support-in-podcast-feeds/

Chacon