Speex:A Free Codec for Free Speech

Jul 7, 2010 by Shivendu Madhava

Another product of Xiph.org, Speex is sort of the Ogg Vorbis answer to speech compression. Unlike music, speech is a lot simpler, and requires much lower bitrates to be aurally readable. As a result, it is only natural that a different set of algorithms than the ones used for music can compress speech a lot better.

Speex is open source, and can be added to the Ogg container.It uses a variable bitrate encoding process to provide the best possible quality in combination with the best compression ratio. It was developed mainly for VoIP, and uses a unique packet loss concealment technology that masks dropped UDP packets, to prevent crackling and breaking of voice data.

Though there are a few more open source audio compression technologies out there, the ones mentioned above are the most popular. It’s time now to look at some software audio players.

Site:http://www.speex.org/