Infuse needs support for the xHE-AAC / USAC format that debuted 8 years ago. It’s the most efficient audio codec currently available, even outstripping Opus:
I have been testing the Exhale encoder for xHE-AAC for a couple weeks now, and I’m extremely impressed. It creates listenable audio all the way down at a bitrate of just 18k! For example, I transcoded the intro of the pilot episode of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” to xHE-AAC 18k Mono using Exhale, then transcoded that to FLAC for compatibility so that you can all hear it:
Isn’t that awesome? That’s at a bitrate of just 18k / 0.018Mbps! And you can generally achieve perceptual losslessness / transparency at just 48k for mono, or 96k for stereo!
Imagine combining xHE-AAC audio with AV1 video that was software transcoded with the efficiency settings cranked up.