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Speex Joins Xiph To Bring Free VOIP To The Masses
xercist writes "Xiph.org
has added a new project to their plate of goodies-
Speex.
Speex is an audio codec specifically for, you guessed it, voice.
It has integration with Xiph's
OGG
container, but is mainly being used right now for VOIP.
There is currently an XMMS
plugin
available, and is also supported by
LinPhone,
OpenH323,
and
GnomeMeeting.
Asterisk PBX
is working on adding support.
This is not a new project -- Jean-Marc Valin has been hard at work writing
the codec for quite a while now. However, Jean-Marc is now a full-fledged
member or the Xiph.org team, and in celebration, Speex beta one is being
released.
Xiph.org has brought you
(or is currently working on bringing you)
Vorbis,
Tremor,
Theora,
Tarkin,
Icecast2,
cdparanoia,
now Speex,
and, of course, the
Moaning Goat Meter.
This is a LOT to do, so please
donate
to show your support."
Yes!
Generally voice is sampled at 8kHz because it generally ranges from around 200Hz to 4kHz and Nyquiest suggests we need a digital sampling rate of twice the highest frequency.
The reason music sounds crappy is that in a well designed system you will loose all the audio components above 4kHz, and in a badly designed system they will manifest themselves as other lower frequencies.
Now this *does not* mean that this codec is a bad codec - merely that's it's one optimised for a specific task.