Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Recommend a speech codec - are there any comparisons anywhere? (Read 1769 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Recommend a speech codec - are there any comparisons anywhere?

I'm looking for a lossy speech codec to pack a large amount of speech into a game I'm making.

• Ideally a non-proprietary codec
• Low quality, high compression
• My audio will be mono, ideally 11,025Hz
• Bit depth will ideally be around 5 or 6 bit, could go higher if necessary

Any suggestions?

Also, does anyone know if there are any speech codec comparisons out there?

Re: Recommend a speech codec - are there any comparisons anywhere?

Reply #1 –
Well, Opus of course.

There are a few speech codec comparisons linked here: https://opus-codec.org/comparison/ (at the bottom)
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Re: Recommend a speech codec - are there any comparisons anywhere?

Reply #2 –
Wow! ktf thank you so much! I had not heard of Opus but it seems AMAZING! I was thinking I'd have to go with mp3 because it's the only free option. This is fantastic! THANK YOU! :-)

Re: Recommend a speech codec - are there any comparisons anywhere?

Reply #3 –
You can find Opus speech samples at https://jmvalin.ca/opus/opus-1.3/. Opus is near state-of-the-art -- there's better, but then you get bad tooling and/or licensing issues.

So what if you want to go lower? You know, may be your game has no texture at all and sound is the only blob (I'm being ridiculous)?

On one path you have Google and Microsoft throwing money into neural network magic, trying to get cheaper phone calls. Google's Lyra is open-source and delivers mind-boggling quality at 3 kbps -- on pure speech samples only. Samples: V1, V2 (current version). Note that whoever wrote the V2 blog page cleverly decided to not try any music this time.

On the other path you have HAMs going... HAM (ba dum tass) on lower bitrates, because radio bandwidth is precious. Codec 2 by DG Rowe is a classical speech codec pushed near its limits. You WILL hear artifacts typical of old-school speech codecs and "radio" sound effect filters.