[Speex-dev] Hints & examples for content creators & packagers

[Pat Smith]

At speex.org, I read that Speex is well-suited to
internet audio streaming and audio books.  However, I am
having difficulty finding or creating audio-book-type
material of acceptable audio quality vs file size.

For the sake of comparison, look at the speex sample in
Ubuntu's example-content_26_all.deb
vs
http://podcast.msnbc.com/audio/podcast/pd_mtp.mp3
The mp3 sounds ok, streams and seeks well over poor net
connections, and can easily have textual info
added/modified as ID3 tags.  The mp3 sounds much better,
with a size of ~0.25MB/minute, vs ~0.3 for speex.

Questions...

Is there a simple app that will record to speex using a
simple tape recorder-like interface (eg you can quickly
rewind to your error, and continue from that point)?

Is there any kind of filter/processor that will produce
very compact low-bandwidth results so that playback
sounds like telephone quality, without any of the scary
digital overcompression effects?

Can any user app play and seek speex streamed over http,
and display and modify author/title/comments?

Is there a way that someone listening to an audio book
in Speex format can skip to a bookmark or to the next
page?

Is there a preprocessor that can help with spoken word
that has music in the background?

Is it unreasonable to suggest that all xiph formats use
the same comment tools?  Can vorbiscomment be adapted?

Wish...

Would anyone here be willing & able to provide a few
diverse examples that show speex at its realworldish
finest, along with technical details of how the speex
files were created?  eg:

# interview recorded in an igloo

# using builtin mic on a microsoft xpod at 48kHz

# processed using sux 5.5:
    sux -l3 -m300 -r -nfg talk48kHz.wav talk4kHz.wav

# encoded using speex 3.0:
    speexenc --vad --vbr --secretcode talk4kHz.wav talk.spx

... and then attach those details to the spx file as
comments.

Wouldn't it be worth creating even 1 good example to
replace what's being distributed by the millions in
Ubuntu?

-- 
screech squawk wail