looking for efficient speech codec Options

[chrizoo]

Hi. I have quite a few speech recordings (talkradio, lectures, notes to self, etc.) which I need to encode. I have done some tests with HE-AAC V2 (Nero AAC codec / 1.5.3.0) and am quite pleased with the quality/filesize ratio.

I then tried speex (speex-1.2beta1/$). When comparing to HE-AACv2 files of the same size, speex failed horribly for me during VLC 1.1.11 playback, suffering from major artefacts and lower overall quality. Not quite what I expected. (Unless VLC decoding is broken or the speex version too old ?)

1. How does speex fare against HE-AACv2 for you ?
   
2. Is there any other substantially more efficient speech codec ?
   
3. What software player (Windows) can you recommend ?
   
4. What considerations should I not overlook if I want to keep the files for life (I'm still young :-) ?

many thanks

[Garf]

[*]Is there any other substantially more efficient speech codec ?

Opus, which is a hybrid of a very good speech and a very good music codec.

[*]What software player (Windows) can you recommend ?

As said, Opus support is just emerging as it came out of the standardization process weeks ago. foobar2000 support appears to be right around the corner, whereas Firefox Nightlies have support for it enabled by default since a few days.

[*]What considerations should I not overlook if I want to keep the files for life (I'm still young :-) ?

Archive them in lossless somewhere? If it's speech then the bitrate shouldn't be very high, especially if they're resampled to say 24kHz first.