[Speex-dev] having trouble building on Mac OS X 10.5

[Stephen Bannasch]

>Stephen Bannasch wrote:
>
>>  I'm getting this error trying to build speex on MacOS X 10.5.6:
>>
>>     ./configure: line 21256: syntax error near unexpected token `FFT,'
>>     ./configure: line 21256: `  PKG_CHECK_MODULES(FFT, fftw3f)'
>
>Why are you compling from Git? If you grab a release tarball you should
>never see an error like that.

Thanks Erik,

I started with the release tarball, had the problem with missing ogg 
dependency, then changed TWO variables at once -- not so smart.

The speex-1.2rc1 tarball compiled fine.

I have a collection of audio speech mp3s and I wanted to try 
converting them to speex to see if I could get smaller sizes and 
reasonable quality.

So my thought was to use ffmpeg which I use for many other conversion 
tasks like this.

But it doesn't seem to encode to speex.

So this is what I am trying now:

One of my 40s originals is 120K:

$ ffmpeg -i f56-speex/fr_56_ch9_p18.mp3
...
Input #0, mp3, from 'f56-speex/fr_56_ch9_p18.mp3':
   Duration: 00:00:40.05, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 24 kb/s
     Stream #0.0: Audio: mp3, 11025 Hz, mono, s16, 24 kb/s

I encode this to an 8kHz wav:

$ ffmpeg -i f56-static/fr_56_ch9_p18.mp3 -ar 8000 
f56-speex/fr_56_ch9_p18_8KHz.wav
...
Input #0, mp3, from 'f56-static/fr_56_ch9_p18.mp3':
   Duration: 00:00:40.05, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 24 kb/s
     Stream #0.0: Audio: mp3, 11025 Hz, mono, s16, 24 kb/s
Output #0, wav, to 'f56-speex/fr_56_ch9_p18_8KHz.wav':
     Stream #0.0: Audio: pcm_s16le, 8000 Hz, mono, s16, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
   Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
[mp3 @ 0x1003600]mdb:28, lastbuf:0 skipping granule 0
size=     587kB time=37.56 bitrate= 128.0kbits/s   
video:0kB audio:587kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.007321%

And then use speexenc to convert the wav to an speex in an ogg container.

$ speexenc f56-speex/fr_56_ch9_p18_8KHz.wav f56-speex/fr_56_ch9_p18_8k.ogg
Encoding 8000 Hz audio using narrowband mode (mono)

The output file: f56-speex/fr_56_ch9_p18_8k.ogg is now just 73k.

I'm sure this can be improved but the voice quality still sounds 
quite good and I've saved 40%.

Now I'm going to investigate JSpeex to see if I can play these back in Java.

Thanks again for the help.