This is more just silly fun than anything useful, but I figured I'd make a small blog post about it. I was recently messing with ffmpeg trying to get a very low, almost unusable audio quality on some music just to see how it'd sound, and I ended up with something that I was happy with.

Here's a standard copy of Hadouk, better known as the hold music for Polycom-based IP phone systems (available on files.thatstel.la):



Now here's Hadouk after being run through the ffmpeg command I came up with:



Encoding your audio

The ffmpeg command I came up with involves the Opus audio codec, which is a lossy codec commonly used in voice calls and other low latency, low bandwidth applications. When used properly, it delivers great sound quality with very minimal resource usage.

This however, is not proper usage of Opus and so it sounds downright awful (which is the point).

You'll need copy of ffmpeg (built with --enable-libopus which most are) and the following commands:

ffmpeg -i [INPUT] -ar 8000 -codec:a libopus -b:a 4k lowquality.opus
ffmpeg -i lowquality.opus lowquality.mp3

On that first command, replace [INPUT] with the path to the file you want encoded. Run them both and once they're done you'll have two files:

  • lowquality.opus file
    • is the raw opus file which is often difficult to play
    • can be deleted if you don't need it
  • lowquality.mp3 file
    • is much easier to work with
    • is what you'll want to share

Enjoy your low quality audio!

If there's enough demand, I could create a little GUI utility written in Python and distributed as a single binary with PyInstaller that does this all for you.