Since late 2021, Meta has been building a new in-house audio codec, and finally has something to show for it – unveiling the Meta Low Bitrate audio codec, aka MLow. The big tech company, which has famously championed the AV1 video codec and co-founded the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), intends to improve audio quality during real-time communications (RTC) while using native voice functionality inside its family of apps – such as voice calls over WhatsApp, or a live broadcast on Instagram. MLow achieves 2x better quality than Opus—the open source audio codec released back in 2012—while keeping computational complexity 10% lower than Opus. Meta’s new audio codec innovation is already fully rolled out on Instagram and Facebook Messenger, while…