Speex For Music: Send Your Comments. Options

[jmvalin]

In the last Speex version (0.8.0), I added a new 42.2 kbps wideband mode which I'd qualify as the first non-catastrophic mode for music. I'd like to have feedback on music quality using that mode, let's say on a scale between "You call that music?" and "Almost as good as MP3". To try that mode, use the --quality 10 option *without* using --vbr. The file needs to be sampled at 16 kHz. The idea of this mode is to be able to encode occasional music segments in a mostly-voice recording (e.g. Internet radio). So what are the opinions?

BTW, Speex source code is available here and there are Windows binaries on RareWares.

[john33]

I noticed that a 22 KHz, mono source is really comprensible, even for music.

Try to use Soundprobe's expander & normalization before compressing... the sound can benefit from them !!!

I think if you compare an ogg created using '-q -1', downmix to mono and resample to 22050, you will get output at approx 16kbps which sounds somewhat better than the speex equivalent. At least it does to my ears!!