Convert OPUS to MP3

How to Convert to MP3

1. 1

   Add your Opus files

   .opus, .oga, .ogg and WebM recordings, up to 200 MB each, twenty at a time.

2. 2

   Choose a bitrate

   128 kbps is the default here, which is already generous for speech. 64 kbps is plenty for a voice note.

3. 3

   Click Convert and download

   The result is an ordinary MP3 with a Xing header, so duration and seeking work correctly.

Why the default here is 128 and not 192

Opus almost never arrives as high-bitrate music. It arrives as a voice message from WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal, recorded mono at somewhere between 16 and 32 kbps, or as a browser recording in a WebM container. Defaulting to 192 kbps, as the other converters on this site do, would produce a file six to eight times larger than the source that sounds precisely identical, because there is no detail in a 24 kbps voice note for the extra bits to encode. 128 kbps already leaves generous headroom for anything Opus realistically carries. If you do have a music file in Opus at a high rate, raising the setting is one click.

Opus is the better codec; this is purely about compatibility

At low bitrates Opus is not slightly better than MP3, it is dramatically better: intelligible speech at rates where MP3 produces a warble, and music at 96 kbps that MP3 needs 160 to match. Nothing about this conversion improves the audio, and it costs a little quality on the way. The reason to do it is that a great many things still do not read Opus: car stereos, older phones, hardware players, several video editors, some transcription services and plenty of desktop software. Converting is how you get the recording into those, and that is the whole justification.

Voice messages, and what to do with them

A voice note is mono, low bitrate and mostly speech. Converting it at 64 kbps produces a file that sounds the same as the original and stays small. Keeping it mono matters as much as the bitrate, since forcing stereo doubles the size to store two copies of the same channel. If the recording is going to a transcription tool rather than to a listener, quality matters even less: those tools resample to 16 kHz mono internally, so anything above 64 kbps is thrown away on arrival.

Opus inside WebM

Recordings made in a browser, from a web app, a meeting tool or a voice recorder page, are usually Opus inside a WebM container rather than Ogg. That file has a .webm extension and often refuses to open in audio software, which assumes WebM means video. It converts here the same way: the container is read, the audio track is taken out and encoded to MP3, and the fact that there was never any video in it causes no trouble.

Frequently asked questions