Skype Gives Away High-quality Audio Codec
Skype will license a high-quality audio codec in its latest VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) software to any developer or vendor free of charge, the eBay subsidiary announced Tuesday.
The codec, called Silk, can deliver sound quality that captures the full sound of the human voice, according to Jonathan Christensen, Skype's general manager of audio and video. This "super-wideband" codec was introduced with the Skype 4.0 for Windows client, announced last month. Christensen unveiled the licensing program, which is live now, at the eComm conference in Burlingame, California.
The traditional phone system uses a narrow band for voice, from 400Hz to 3,400Hz, that cuts off high and low frequencies. This allows voice to be carried in a standard 64Kb per second (Kbps) channel but has disadvantages, such as blurring the difference between similar sounds such as "f" and "s."
