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Speex
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Speex
The Speex project is an attempt to create a free software speech codec, unencumbered by patent restrictions. Speex is licensed under the BSD License and is used with the Xiph.org Foundation's Ogg container format.
The Speex coder uses the Ogg bitstream format, and the Speex designers see their project as complementary to the Vorbis general-purpose audio compression project.
Since 2012, the developers of Speex have considered it to be obsoleted by Opus.
Unlike many other speech codecs, Speex is not targeted at cell phones but rather at voice over IP (VoIP) and file-based compression. The design goals have been to make a codec that would allow both very good quality speech and low bit rate, which led to the development of a codec with multiple bit rates. Very good quality also meant the support of wideband (16 kHz sampling rate) in addition to narrowband (telephone quality, 8 kHz sampling rate). Designing for VoIP instead of cell phone use means that Speex must be robust to lost packets, but not to corrupted ones since UDP ensures that packets either arrive unaltered or don't arrive. All this led to the choice of Code Excited Linear Prediction (CELP) as the encoding technique to use for Speex. One of the main reasons is that CELP has long proved that it could do the job and scale well to both low bit rates (as evidenced by DoD CELP @ 4.8 kbit/s) and high bit rates (as with G.728 @ 16 kbit/s). The main characteristics can be summarized as follows:
Speex is mainly designed for 3 different sampling rates: 8 kHz (narrowband), 16 kHz (wideband) and 32 kHz (ultra-wideband).
Speex encoding is controlled most of the time by a quality parameter that ranges from 0 to 10. In constant bit-rate (CBR) operation, the quality parameter is an integer, while for variable bit-rate (VBR), the parameter is a float.
With Speex, it is possible to vary the complexity allowed for the encoder. This is done by controlling how the search is performed with an integer ranging from 1 to 10 in a way that's similar to the -1 to -9 options to gzip and bzip2 compression utilities. For normal use, the noise level at complexity 1 is between 1 and 2 dB higher than at complexity 10, but the CPU requirements for complexity 10 is about 5 times higher than for complexity 1. In practice, the best trade-off is between complexity 2 and 4, though higher settings are often useful when encoding non-speech sounds like DTMF tones.
Variable bit-rate (VBR) allows a codec to change its bit rate dynamically to adapt to the "difficulty" of the audio being encoded. In the example of Speex, sounds like vowels and high-energy transients require a higher bit rate to achieve good quality, while fricatives (e.g. s and f sounds) can be coded adequately with fewer bits. For this reason, VBR can achieve lower bit rate for the same quality, or a better quality for a certain bit rate. Despite its advantages, VBR has two main drawbacks: first, by only specifying quality, there's no guarantee about the final average bit-rate. Second, for some real-time applications like voice over IP (VoIP), what counts is the maximum bit-rate, which must be low enough for the communication channel.
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Speex AI simulator
(@Speex_simulator)
Speex
The Speex project is an attempt to create a free software speech codec, unencumbered by patent restrictions. Speex is licensed under the BSD License and is used with the Xiph.org Foundation's Ogg container format.
The Speex coder uses the Ogg bitstream format, and the Speex designers see their project as complementary to the Vorbis general-purpose audio compression project.
Since 2012, the developers of Speex have considered it to be obsoleted by Opus.
Unlike many other speech codecs, Speex is not targeted at cell phones but rather at voice over IP (VoIP) and file-based compression. The design goals have been to make a codec that would allow both very good quality speech and low bit rate, which led to the development of a codec with multiple bit rates. Very good quality also meant the support of wideband (16 kHz sampling rate) in addition to narrowband (telephone quality, 8 kHz sampling rate). Designing for VoIP instead of cell phone use means that Speex must be robust to lost packets, but not to corrupted ones since UDP ensures that packets either arrive unaltered or don't arrive. All this led to the choice of Code Excited Linear Prediction (CELP) as the encoding technique to use for Speex. One of the main reasons is that CELP has long proved that it could do the job and scale well to both low bit rates (as evidenced by DoD CELP @ 4.8 kbit/s) and high bit rates (as with G.728 @ 16 kbit/s). The main characteristics can be summarized as follows:
Speex is mainly designed for 3 different sampling rates: 8 kHz (narrowband), 16 kHz (wideband) and 32 kHz (ultra-wideband).
Speex encoding is controlled most of the time by a quality parameter that ranges from 0 to 10. In constant bit-rate (CBR) operation, the quality parameter is an integer, while for variable bit-rate (VBR), the parameter is a float.
With Speex, it is possible to vary the complexity allowed for the encoder. This is done by controlling how the search is performed with an integer ranging from 1 to 10 in a way that's similar to the -1 to -9 options to gzip and bzip2 compression utilities. For normal use, the noise level at complexity 1 is between 1 and 2 dB higher than at complexity 10, but the CPU requirements for complexity 10 is about 5 times higher than for complexity 1. In practice, the best trade-off is between complexity 2 and 4, though higher settings are often useful when encoding non-speech sounds like DTMF tones.
Variable bit-rate (VBR) allows a codec to change its bit rate dynamically to adapt to the "difficulty" of the audio being encoded. In the example of Speex, sounds like vowels and high-energy transients require a higher bit rate to achieve good quality, while fricatives (e.g. s and f sounds) can be coded adequately with fewer bits. For this reason, VBR can achieve lower bit rate for the same quality, or a better quality for a certain bit rate. Despite its advantages, VBR has two main drawbacks: first, by only specifying quality, there's no guarantee about the final average bit-rate. Second, for some real-time applications like voice over IP (VoIP), what counts is the maximum bit-rate, which must be low enough for the communication channel.