Speex

» see speex.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Voice chat in the Turkish internet cafe years was something you heard rather than something you chose. You sat down at a machine with the headset already plugged in and somebody's Ventrilo was already connected. The voices came through thin and clipped, and over whatever line the cafe had they stayed perfectly intelligible. Nobody in that room knew the name of the thing doing the compression, and for Ventrilo the answer was Speex.

Jean-Marc Valin started it in 2002 and version 1.0 came out in March 2003, under a BSD-style license, from the Xiph.Org Foundation. Vorbis was the music codec that let you ship audio without writing a check to the MP3 patent pool. Speex was the speech one, aimed at voice over IP, running from 2 to 44 kilobits per second with voice activity detection and variable bit rate in the design.

The reason it mattered is dull and enormous. Speech coding in 2003 was a licensed business. If you wanted voice in a product you paid somebody per seat for G.729 or for AMR, and if you were a small developer or an open source project you simply did not ship voice at all. Speex was patent free and good enough at narrowband, so it landed everywhere nobody could afford a license. Adobe added it to Flash Player 10 in 2008, which put this codec behind a large share of the voice that moved through browsers before WebRTC existed.

~ an orange box on the homepage ~

The Opus codec reference implementation reached 1.0 on 11 September 2012, published through the IETF as RFC 6716, built by the same foundation out of the work that had gone into CELT and SILK. It covered the range both Speex and Vorbis had covered, at better quality and lower latency than either.

The Internet Archive has the moment. The capture of speex.org from 11 September 2012 is the ordinary page. The capture from the 20th has a box bordered and tinted orange sitting above the content. The text inside says that the Speex codec has been obsoleted by Opus and will continue to be available, then adds that since Opus is better than Speex in all aspects, users are encouraged to switch. The notice went up within nine days of Opus 1.0 shipping.

Most dead software gets a farewell blog post, or it gets nothing at all. This one got a banner written by its own author recommending the replacement, and the banner is still there in October 2026, fourteen years later, on a site that has never gone down.

~ the record ~

~ releases after the funeral ~

The strange part is what happened next. Speex had been sitting at 1.2 release candidate 1 since July 2008, the way plenty of free software projects sit at a release candidate forever. Four years after being declared obsolete, on 7 December 2016, the project shipped 1.2.0 as a stable release. Another six years after that, on 16 June 2022, it shipped 1.2.1.

The non-codec half explains it. The resampler and the acoustic echo canceller were split out as SpeexDSP, and that code went on living inside other people's audio stacks long after nobody was encoding anything with the codec. The part of Speex that compressed your voice was finished in 2012. The part that cleaned your microphone up before it got there is still in use.

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