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Subject: New voice file format for software decoding targets

New voice file format for software decoding targets

From: Thom Johansen <thomj_at_rockbox.org>
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:15:56 +0100

Hi all!
The following change does not apply to Archos/hardware decoder
targets, so if you only use these, you can safely ignore this
mail.

Starting very soon, all our software decoding targets will
switch voice file format from MP3 to our own home-brewed Speex
(http://www.speex.org/) file format. This switch will result in
voice files that are of higher quality at smaller sizes. In case
you are wondering why we don't just allow any format for voice
files, the reason is that using a single codec like this allows
us to remove a lot of complexity from the voice UI handling in
Rockbox and manage our resources more carefully. We chose to use
Speex since its intended use is speech compression, is good
quality and is both efficient and small. If you have any old voice
files you're really fond of, do not upgrade your build as they
will become useless in newer builds. All .talk files will also
need to be regenerated. Procedures for generating voice files
should not be altered. The new encoder is bundled in rockbox, to
be found in the tools/ directory, and is called rbspeexenc.
We have found no bugs during testing, but any change of this
magnitude might easily destabilize things a bit, so please
wait and see how things work out before upgrading if you are
dependent on the voice UI functionality.

As stated in the top of the mail, this change does not affect
users of hardware decoding based targets, such as the Archos
Player/Recorder/Ondio. These targets will still use the old
MP3 based format because of obvious reasons.

Thom
Received on 2007-11-16

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