Self-explanatory subject line: Speex has now reached RC1. From the Speex project page:



Still no word as to whether the next Vorbis decoder update will incorporate Speex, or when is might arrive... but any progress is welcome.

- M.

Wow, that's quick! I haven't even had time to the the announcement myself


I guess you mean "integration with Ogg tools" because Vorbis itself will never support Speex. There's currently some work being done to make ogg123 decode Speex files, but I can't say when it will be released.

Hi Jean-Marc. Sorry to pre-empt your announcement... when I saw the January 15th release date (that is, yesterday) in the Roadmap I assumed an announcement had just been overlooked.

About Vorbis/Vorbis tools supporting Speex, what I mean is that an integrated decoder which could be used in hardware devices (still thinking of efforts to adapt Tremor for an iRiver circuit board...) would be nice, so that such devices could also play Speex-encoded files. Any chance of this?

- M.

Not likely. Vorbis and Speex are two completely separate codecs and the only resemblance is that both use Ogg as their "standard" container. Also, there's no fixed-point implementation of Speex yet, so the work necessary to put it in a hardware decoder is higher than for Vorbis, while the benefits are smaller (the only application I see is audio book). The only place we *might* see "mobile" Speex applications is in the PDA area (e.g. voice recorder, audio books).

... exactly.

- M.

Still all is not lost. I've had reports of people playing Speex files in real-time on ARM-based PDA's, even with floating point emulation.

I recompiled all my Speex plugins, components and filters to use new library version, download here.
I also uploaded win32 binaries of speexenc + speexdec.

Updated Win32 binaries of speexenc, speexdec and speexdrop are at my 'Others' page at Mirror 1.

Do you mean Speex is gonna be part of Ogg soon?!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!

how will that work exactly? will all bitrates under like 20 be handled by Speex or something? or will the encoder simply sence if this is a spoken word recording and if the bitrate requested is real low, it will use speex.

Being "part of Ogg" doesn't mean anything. Ogg is just a container. It's like saying "part of XML". Basically, Speex has been using the Ogg container since the very early stage and Speex is now part of Xiph.org like Ogg and Vorbis.

One other mis-conception about Speex vs. Vorbis is that it's about bit-rate. It's not. Music encoded with Speex will sound much worse than Vorbis regardless of bit-rate. On the other hand, speech will sound better. Eventually, there might be a "super-codec" that switches between Speex and Vorbis, but don't hold your breath.

ok. i knew the second part, but thanks for the first thing you said.

so does that mean future ogg decoders (like the winamp ogg input plugin) will be able to play speex files that are in ogg containers?

only speex drop is up, the binaries aren't

and what am i supposed to set "number of frames per ogg packet" at? i never heard of this feature before.

Sorry, a typo in the html!! Now corrected.

Jean-Marc is the guy to answer that one, but I don't believe it makes a whole lot of difference to anything normally.

There are already Speex plugins for Winamp, xmms and other apps. Look at the "plugins & software" page.

As for the meaning of --nframes (i.e. number of frames per packet), it's use is to save on the overhead of the Ogg container. An Ogg stream is divided into packets and there's a fixed overhead in the order of 400 bps. In most cases, this isn't problematic, but for very low bit-rates it can be. For these cases, you can ask Speex to put more than one frame and thus divide the overhead by that number.

1. i know there are plugins for speex. i use one of winamp. im saying, if someone puts a speex file in an ogg container and plays it in winamp and there is no speex plugin installed but there is a ogg plugin installed, in the future, will it be able to play the file? or will you need to install the speex plugin? if so, why have the file in an ogg container at all? on second thought, maybe the current container speex uses is the ogg container. that would explain why there is ogg header options in speexdrop.


2. As for the header frames thingamajig... how do i know if it is being problematic? im not sure what to look for.

This might be a poor analogy but I always thought of Ogg as the wheel and that wheel works the same way on a car or a bicycle. The method of energy transfer to become mobile is different for each vehicle and requires different fuel types (Speex, Vorbis). In this sense you can not put Pepsi in your car and expect it to run the same.

Ogg is a container format -- nothing else.

So an 'ogg plugin' would only know how to take the stuff inside the ogg container, and pass it on to plugins which know about specific formats (just like AVI, or Quicktime). This probably isn't how it works in WinAmp, but it's how things *should* be done.

Ogg containers can contain anything, although until recently the only thing you'd see inside an ogg container would be vorbis audio.

Recently, other projects have started using the ogg container for their formats, instead of having to invent some container format of their own. Speex uses an ogg container, and FLAC is transitioning from its own container format to ogg.



As the man said -- putting something in an ogg container adds some overhead to the filesize. For large enough bitrates, this overhead is negligible (less than 1%). However, for very low bitrate Speex files, the overhead can take up a significant part of the bitrate of the encoded file. In order to reduce this overhead, the Speex encoder lets you place more than one encoded Speex 'frame' inside an ogg 'packet'. This reduces the overhead of the container, at the cost of increased latency in streaming situations. You only need to worry about this if you're planning on encoding very low bitrate Speex files.

Minor point: native FLAC will still stay around; it is the most useful for storing simple streams of audio. But there will be increased Ogg FLAC support in the Ogg tools (e.g. I believe oggenc already accepts FLAC now) and I will be adding the missing features (like seeking) to libOggFLAC.

Josh

Currently, at least, it's 'unofficial'. It's produced by Stan Seibert (aka Volsung).

In the past, Speex was not able to handle stereo wave input without using a frontend. Is it possible now?

Yes, it seems to work, but am unable to test it as I have no plugin for winamp to play spx files..... Does such a plugin exist? Where can I get it from?

Please reply, anyone............

Here!!

Cheers!!!!