[Asterisk-Users] Voicemail2

[John Harragin]

>> Speex would be possible, but wav49 sounds like the best plan.

>Is WAV49 MS only?  Last time I looked it didn't seem that non-MS
> machines could play such files.  We're using MP3 for our customers
> because of this, but I'd love to be told I'm wrong, since 16k MP3
> doesn't always sound that good for voice (and I've tried various
> encodings).

Check this out... http://www.speex.org/audio/samples/ These are far better
for voice than mp3s at a given rate. Also it is under a BSD license. Your
clients may need the decoder installed - they have them for Unix, windows
and who knows what else... the encoding seems to be more cpu intensive (as
you crank the quality up) - and if we were to use this, it might be best to
have an encoding queue and encode only for the individual's who select email
or web messaging so as not to bog down asterisk. On my voice I found 6kbps
acceptable. I was playing around with a windows drop on encoder where I did
not have the time to play with all the parameters in depth and my 4 kbps
files did not sound as good as the sample files (vbr did, but with my
settings the files were bigger than 4kbps I found one setting that sounded
fantastic compressing from a 181k 16bit file 8000hz to 17k - this file was
still pretty nice compressed to 10k. Below 7k (these are file sizes) I could
still understand but sounded like a Borg drone) - I'll be doing more
extensive testing from a prompt where I have better control of the
parameters and post the results.

John



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