Probably NAIVE question on (lossy?) voice compression

I'm interested in settling in my own mind what makes speech intelligible.

In past wanderings of the WEB I have gathered the impression that 
there are a wide variety of compression.decompression algorithms 
available depending on your optimization target. Unfortunately, I 
don't have a good record of where I've been.

I'm doing this on a hobbyist budget ( ie $ = 0 ).

Could someone point me to a source of FREE exe's or DLL's. [That is 
free as in "free beer", free as in "free speech" optional]

Are any of the algorithm's describable in Scilab. Speed of conversion 
process is irrelevant. I'm dealing with data stored on disk &/or CD.

Thank you.

Richard Owlett wrote:

> I'm interested in settling in my own mind what makes speech intelligible.
> 
> In past wanderings of the WEB I have gathered the impression that there 
> are a wide variety of compression.decompression algorithms available 
> depending on your optimization target. Unfortunately, I don't have a 
> good record of where I've been.
> 
> I'm doing this on a hobbyist budget ( ie $ = 0 ).
> 
> Could someone point me to a source of FREE exe's or DLL's. [That is free 
> as in "free beer", free as in "free speech" optional]

My HawkVoiceDI is free both ways. The list of codecs it includes, with some 
short voice samples, is here: http://www.hawksoft.com/hawkvoice/codecs.shtml

> Are any of the algorithm's describable in Scilab. Speed of conversion 
> process is irrelevant. I'm dealing with data stored on disk &/or CD.
> 
> Thank you.

-- 
Phil Frisbie, Jr.
Hawk Software
http://www.hawksoft.com