[vorbis] Vorbis vs Speex

[J C Fitzgerald]

On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 02:23:31PM +1200, J C Fitzgerald wrote:
> 
> 1.  Which would your experiences show is the better codec for recording
>     high quality speech such as radio interviews?
> 
After much experimentation over the last few months, I'm now in a position
to answer my own question.  I have to say that I agree with "noprivacy"
when he said:

On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 02:28:06PM -0500, noprivacy at earthlink.net wrote:
>
> I've tried it, but I really wasn't impressed with Speex.  mp3 & ogg at their
> lowest settings worked better.
  .....
> Speex isn't that good.
>

I found that bit for bit, Vorbis never gives lower quality for speech
than Speex and it's usually considerably higher.  Vorbis seems more
suitable for file-based spoken audios than Speex.

There are also a number of non-quality issues to take into account:

*  It is unclear whether Speex will ever be included in hardware devices,
*  The Speex user base may not have the critical mass needed to ensure its
   survival,
*  It seems doubtful that it will ever be widely supported in software,
*  Unexpected non-spoken components trigger a switch to Vorbis anyway, and
*  There are advantages to using a single lossy format for all recordings.

I regret these findings because I like the idea of having a format
specificly targetted at speech, but for my purposes Vorbis seems the
better choice at present.  I do hope that Speex continues to flourish and
improve, but suspect that it will do so more in arenas such as telephony.

John.
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