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Topic: Which Are The Options Of Audio Codec For Voice? (Read 4908 times) previous topic - next topic
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Which Are The Options Of Audio Codec For Voice?

Hi, people!

I ask for your help, because I need to know which are the audio codec that are suitable for voice. I am on a academic project, in the Institute of Psychology of my university, and we will compress the recordings of psychotherapeutic sessions.

It is not required that the chosen codec be specific for voice. Options such as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis have the advantage of being popular and widespread. For me, what is the most important is to obtain low bitrates with the minimum quality for understading what is said.

I thank in advance all the help I can have,
Faelix.

Which Are The Options Of Audio Codec For Voice?

Reply #1 –
Speex sounds like a good voice codec. I think it's integrated (or going to be integrated) into the OGG format now too, so you might get the "popular" advantage too.

Which Are The Options Of Audio Codec For Voice?

Reply #2 –
Quote
Speex sounds like a good voice codec. I think it's integrated (or going to be integrated) into the OGG format now too, so you might get the "popular" advantage too.

With Speex, you can get reasonnable quality at 8 kbps or even lower (or higher quality at higher bit-rate). The Speex bit-stream is integrated in the Ogg format, but current ogg tools (e.g. ogg123) cannot decode it yet (support for Speex is ogg123 is planned though). Unless there's some other requirement, I think Speex is probably the best choice for your application, since it's optimized for voice and it's faster than most codecs designed for audio (playback can work in real-time, even on a 486).

Which Are The Options Of Audio Codec For Voice?

Reply #3 –
Thank you very much for your answer. I have visited Speex's website, and I've found it an excellent solution for my voice compression necessity. Also, I've seen that it is still on beta version. So, I think I should share with you my fears: as I need this codec for archiving important data, I'm wondering about the future of Speex, because I must be sure that these data will be useful for a long time.

Which Are The Options Of Audio Codec For Voice?

Reply #4 –
AFAIK the bitstream format of sppex is 'pseudo-freezed' by now and will not change if not really necessary.
"To understand me, you'll have to swallow a world." Or maybe your words.

Which Are The Options Of Audio Codec For Voice?

Reply #5 –
Quote
as I need this codec for archiving important data, I'm wondering about the future of Speex, because I must be sure that these data will be useful for a long time.

Aside from the the 'pseudo-freeze' mentioned, one of the other advantages of speex is that you can include the *source code* for the decoder that works *with these files* on your backup medium.  So even if the format changes so much that the files could not be played back with future software, you know that you can create a player that will work for those files (without having to find some obsolete hardware) in 20 years time.

This is something that closed formats can't provide, and I think it makes speex, ogg and flac (and other open source formats) absolutely *required* for work such as yours.

Cheers, Paul
 

Which Are The Options Of Audio Codec For Voice?

Reply #6 –
Garf's Ogg Floppy-mode

Just kidding.