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@benpate I highly recommend Opus these days because it offers the best compression/quality ratio at pretty much all bitrates¹ ², and at the same time it's also supported in almost all browsers.

Exceptions are: IE (<0.5% market share) with no support at all, and Safari/iOS up to 17.3 (~4.5% market share) only supports opus in a CAF container, hence a fallback is required for these.

Faircamp currently provides streaming assets as Opus 96 kbit/s [-codec:a libopus -b:a 96k] with MP3 VBR V5 (120-150kbit/s) [-codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 5] as a fallback, respectively as Opus 48kbit/s [-codec:a libopus -b:a 48k] and MP3 VBR V7 (80-120kbit/s) [-codec:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 7] with the "frugal" option.

As the market share for iOS17.3 shrinks further I'll see if opus-only (in a WEBM container) is supported everywhere and go that road eventually.

¹ "In listening tests around 64 kbit/s, Opus shows superior quality compared to HE-AAC codecs (...) In listening tests around 96 kbit/s, Opus shows slightly superior quality compared to AAC and significantly better quality compared to Vorbis and MP3." – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#Quality_comparison_and_low-latency_performance

² https://opus-codec.org/comparison/ has some studies linked like e.g. https://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm - note that in the meantime opus 1.1 supposedly increased quality even further, this is not yet reflected in these tests.