[Speex-dev] Quick survey for Speex 1.2

[Thorvald Natvig]

Jean-Marc Valin wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> As you may have guess, Speex 1.2 is slowly approaching, though there's
> still a lot left to do so I can't say how long it'll take. I thought
> this was the right time to ask if there's anything missing or that can
> be improved to make 1.2 better. At this point, it can't be anything
> major, but there are still some changes that are possible, e.g:
>
> - Improving some component that doesn't behave very well.
> - Improving a confusing API.
> - Improving robustness of a component to a specific condition
> - Adding a minor feature
> ...
>
> So what's your favourite "I wish Speex could..." or "Speex sucks
> because..."? I won't promise I'll take everything into account, but I'll
> do my best -- if not for 1.2, then maybe for 1.4. Oh, and no I will not
> make Speex compatible with G.729 :-)
>
> 	Jean-Marc
>
> P.S. I finally got around to posting my trivial Speex client that shows
> how to use Speex with the echo canceller, preprocessor and jitter
> buffer. It's in svn at http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/speex/speexclient/
>   
 /* FIXME: This VAD is a kludge */
.. and it shows (or hears?) unfortunately. I've run a few tests with it 
with my users, and they complain that it misdetects too often... In both 
directions. Non-speech is detected as speech more often than before, and 
more important it also doesn't detect speech as good as before.
I'd really like to see this "fixed" in some way before 1.2.

I used to grab quite a few bits of data directly from the 
SpeexPreprocessState structure. I have a Audio Statistics window in my 
application which would show SNR info (Zlast), the speech probability 
and a graphical view of ps and noise. This really helped users to 
improve the quality of their input, as they could clearly and 
immediately see the effect of changes in the environment.
These data are now private and can't easily be extracted from an outside 
program. Would it be possible to add _ctl calls to GET_PS, GET_NOISE, 
GET_SNR etc? Would you accept patches which did this?