[Speex-dev] Using speex!

[Mark Tranchant]

Just a quick note to let you guys know I've started encoding my church's 
sermons to Speex format as well as MP3.

The audio is recorded off cassette (yuk) onto my PC as a 16kHz 24-bit 
sample rate stereo WAV in Audacity (the PA system is mono, but sometimes 
one channel of the tape performs better than the other...). I then trim 
off the non-sermon bits of the service, normalize/compress as required, 
pick a channel and export as WAV. I then use:

speexenc --comp 5 -w --abr 16000 --dtx --denoise  --agc

and

lame -m m --abr 32 -h

to generate the files. Speex seems to give equivalent "listenability" at 
16kbps as MP3 does as 32kbps.

I thought this might be a useful resource of real-world material with 
fairly low-quality original source. Sermons are available at:

http://billericaybaptist.net/sermons

with two more appearing each week.

Thanks for an excellent codec, although I suspect most of my "users" 
will go for the MP3 version...  :-(

-- 
Mark.
mark at tranchant.plus.com
http://tranchant.plus.com/