Download Speex 1.2 beta 1

Speex is an open source audio codec designed specifically for transmitting speech over a network. For a comparison of the possibilities of this codec compared to others, we refer you to this page. And when you want to judge the sound quality stand on this page a number of examples. The developers have released the first beta version of Speex 1.2 and announced it as follows:

Speex 1.2beta1: Better, smaller, faster and more

This new release brings many significant improvements. The quality has been improved, both at the encoder level and the decoder level. These include enhancer improvements (now on by default), input/output high-pass filters, as well as fixing minor regressions in previous 1.1.x releases. A strange and rare instability problem with pure sinusoids has also been fixed. On top of that, memory use has been greatly reduced, especially for fixed-point and narrowband. The fixed-point narrowband encoder+decoder memory use has been cut by more than half, making it possible to fit both in less than 6 kB of RAM. In general, CPU requirement had gone down, especially for the fixed-point port. The Blackfin port has been speeded up significantly, thanks to David Rowe. There are also a few fixes for the TI C5X DSPs, as well as better support for C++ compilers and crappy MS compilers. Oh, and before anyone starts worrying, the format (bit-stream) itself has not changed, so Speex is still compatible with version 1.0 and will continue to be in the future.

Non-codec improvements include an extension (easier to use) to the echo canceller API and a Speex-independent version of the jitter buffer. The echo canceller should also be more robust to saturation in the capture path. Last, but not least, the documentation has been updated.[break]Speex 1.2 beta 1 is available in the following flavours:
Source
Linux i386RPM
Linux i386 DevelopmentRPM
Linux SourceRPM
Windows binaries (libspeex)
Windows binaries (tools)