curl -m 7200 http://www.drtak.org/teaches/ARC/cisp317/0821.spx | speexdec - 0821.wav
If you download the file first (let's say it is called 0801.spx), you can use the following command to convert it:
speexdec 0821.spx 0821.wav
Once a .WAV file is created, you can use the media player bundled with Windows to play it. On most systems, you simply have to double-click on the .WAV file to start playing back.
The nice part about using a ``regular'' player to play the .WAV file is that you can repeat, pause, resume and fast-forward.
For those who like a challenge (and understand OS concepts), here's
my challenge. In Windows (and Linux, of course), one can create
``named pipes''. A named pipe has a path of \\.\pipe\whatever.
The nice thing about a named pipe that is the producer of the pipe can
be a program completely different from the consumer of the pipe.
In other words, it'd be nice to be able to use a command line like
this:
curl -m 7200 http://www.drtak.org/teaches/ARC/cisp317/0821.spx | speexdec - \\.\pipe\0821.wav
This command streams the voice file to convert from .SPX
format to .WAV, but the new ``file'' is now a named pipe.
If the media player accepts named pipes as filenames, then you can
specify \\.\pipe\0821.wav as a file. This way, you get the
cool features of your regular media player software while using the
highly compressed Speex encoding for over-the-net transmission.
Of course, whether the default Windows media player will take a named pipe as a file is another story.