Our experimental fork of DroidStar can now decode M17 voice with a neural vocoder. The new decoder comes from Codec2-mod-neural, which uses the FARGAN network from the Opus project. It takes the same Codec2 3200 frames every M17 radio already sends and turns them into wideband 16 kHz speech instead of the classic 8 kHz sinusoidal synthesis. Nothing changes on the transmitting side, the bitstream is untouched, so you get the improvement on every 3200 bps M17 stream you receive, no matter who is talking.
Installing
- Download the zipped APK file below.
- Unpack it and open the DroidStar.apk file. Android will ask you to allow installs from your browser or file manager – allow it.
- If you already have DroidStar installed and Android refuses to update it, uninstall the old version first and install again. Your settings (callsign, hosts) will need to be entered again.
To enable the neural synthesizer, go to Settings and scroll down to “Neural Codec2 decoder (M17 3200)” – tick it. Connect to a reflector afterwards, as usual.
Tell us how it sounds and which phone you use. Waiting for comments!
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