Good catch, I meant large amounts of speech. For audio, you can use the already supported Vorbis format (ogg). According to what I've read, Speex is designed specifically for speech. That dBpoweramp codec page says specifically not to use it for music. I guess it's "smart" enough to know the difference, and I don't see why the same company would create two formats, one for standard audio (Vorbis) and another for speech (Speex). The also have their answer to MPEG4 video called Theora (Wintermute Engine has supported this for sometime), and a few other projects, but Speex, Theora, and Vorbis (which 3DGS can already read) are the main ones for us.

Anyway, thanks for catching that. It actually does make a difference. I'm going to do a bit more research on it, and if I find anything that really outlines the difference between "speech" and "audio" I'll post it here.


@jcl: When you see this, if you could verify whether you might add this to your todo list, I would appreciate it greatly. It's not one of those "I need it now not yesterday" deals, but it would determine my next move in regards to a 3rd party alternative sooner rather than later. If you think it might make it in (should you decide to implement it) say in the next 6 months, then that's fine by me. I'm getting to the point in my project where I'm needing to make some decisions (some free, some not), so I'm in a heavy duty organizing mode. Sorry if I become a bother. Implementing Theora playback would be nice, too.