[speex-dev] preliminary Speex support in Sweep

[Conrad Parker]

Hi Jean-Marc and others,

I put Speex support in Sweep (a sound editor) yesterday, and had some
fun with it :) I'd like to get some feedback before releasing it
publically.

I'm not really used to speech codecs (I work more with music) but I've
been quite impressed at the file size and quality (especially when you
hear what I did with some of the sample files ;)

I didn't have any problems working with the library; as I knew the general
structure of Ogg, everything else was very well explained in the Speex
manual.

So far there's decoding and encoding, with a GUI for encoding including
all the options speexenc has:

  http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/images/screenshots/tour/speex.png

(The only thing really missing is comments/metadata, which I need to catch
up on in other formats too :)

Here's a source tarball (builds against a *shared* lib of Speex Beta One):

  http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/download/sweep-0.5.8-spx1.tar.gz

and this page contains some info on other libraries needed (not many!):

  http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/download.html

<p>Now then, three questions:

        * configure.in defines AC_DISABLE_SHARED; for some reason I
        couldn't run AC_CHECK_LIB against the static library, so I
        uncommented that line (built a shared libspeex.so) -- you will
        probably need to do that too to configure sweep with speex
        support. How intentional is this -- do you intend that shared
        libraries not be built (yet)?

        * for decoding a speex file into an editor, would you want
        perceptual enhancement to be turned on by default?

        * is the range for COMPLEXITY 1-10? I assume so because the
        other parameters have this range (and it seems to work :), but
        this was missing from the manual.

<p>Ok, now the fun stuff. Why Speex support in sweep? sure you can edit files,
and even though it's bad to transcode between voice formats, you can at
least use sweep to graphically compare files encoded with speex with
those encoded in other formats including GSM 6.10, G721/G723 ADPCM and
12/16/24 bit DWVW (those from libsndfile), as well as Vorbis and MPEG.

plus, sweep is just cool fun for playing with audio files. There's now
a couple of interesting Speex files on sweep's demo page:

  http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/demos.html

you might recognise the origins of those files :) I hope you find Sweep's
scrubbing useful for manually analysing files, or at least just for
having fun with them.

oh yeah; a related question to those demos:

        * what mime type should speex files have? I'm guessing
        audio/x-speex

That's enough questions for now :) please let us know if you have any
troubles building sweep. Once the shared/static library thing is sorted
out (eg. if someone knows how to check against static libraries) then
speex support will be in the next release of sweep :)

Conrad.
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