Speex: Free Voice Coding
The Speex project
aims to build an open-source patent-free voice codec. Unlike other codecs
like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, Speex is specially
designed for compressing voice at low bit-rates for applications such as
voice over IP (VoIP). In some sense, it is meant to be complementary to the
Ogg Vorbis codec.
If you are interested in participating to the project, contact us at
speex-devel@lists.sourceforge.net or
join our mailing list. Right now, we are mostly looking for developers
with signal processing and speech coding knowledge, as well as people with
knowledge about patents in that field.
Download
You can download Speex from
here.
News
2002/03/27
Speex 0.0.1 has been released. This first version of Speex supports fixed
bit-rate encoding at 14.5 kbps for speech sampled at 8 kHz (narrowband)
and at 28.5 kbps for 16 kHz (wideband) speech. Future releases will likely
provide a wider choice of bit-rates, better quality, as well as variable
bit-rate (VBR) and discontinuous transmission (DTX).
Note that this is a preliminary release and that bit-rates, quality and
bitstream definition will change in the future. This means that the format
used in this release will not be compatible with future releases. Also note
that this software has so far recieved only a minimum amount of testing, so
it may break or do unexpected things.
2002/03/12
We now have a working encoder prototype that produces good quality narrowband
(8 kHz sampling rate) at a bit-rate of 14.5 kb/s. There is still a lot to
do, but we're progressing fast. You can download a snapshot of the current
code here.