I'm sharing records from phone conferences on my website, and would like to save space. It would be nice if I could use speex as I get about 5:1 compression compared to mp3. However most people would need help getting speex to play on their computer, and can't play it on their portable devices.
What can I use to get good compression for speech that average people will be able to play?
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The only ubiquitous one is mp3. AAC is great on Apple products, but only mp3 works on everything.
When storing voice audio you can go for a very low quality, and potentially use mono if you don't require stereo. This will give you very high compression - approaching that of speex.
From the Wikipedia comparison page
Bit Rate:
It depends on what is your target platform. Is it computers or mobile phones or something else? What OS is this?
As such, I believe speex is definitely a better choice. It is a speech codec, whereas mp3 is an audio codec. Speex is supported by most platforms.
To ease the download try using Gstreamer or ffmpeg where this comes built-in. So user's don't have to put so much extra work into it.
GSM encoded WAV files are a good option.
I did some testing and got very good file size reduction results with perfectly acceptable audio quality.
The original file directly from my phone system was 272 KB. The file I converted into GSM was 28KB.
Here are the links for the sample files. Orignal File http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3594910/random_audio/vmail_16783201700_221_20110217160445.wav
GSM File http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3594910/random_audio/vmail_16783201700_221_20110217160445_GSM.wav
