The Softphone that Gene Built

April 7, 2013

This is the IAX softphone that Gene built, so that he could make low-latency¹, almost free phone calls from his computer anywhere in the world.

Figure 1: BlueVoice (original UI)

This is the wireless headset that Gene uses along with the IAX softphone that Gene built.

Figure 2: Plantronics CS-50 USB Headset

This is the wireless headset that Gene bought to replace the first one because a Mac OS X update broke the USB compatibility on which the headset’s wake-from-sleep depended.

Figure 3: Plantronics Savi W440 Headset

These are the open-source audio processing libraries on which Gene’s softphone depends, that haven’t been updated since 2008, and that Gene now has to port to 64-bit Mountain Lion.

Figure 4: IAXClient library on SourceForge

So that Gene can actually build his softphone again.

To make low-latency, almost free phone calls from his computer anywhere in the world.

Footnotes:

I’ve never been happy with the latency that seems to be endemic to SIP softphones. Building my own softphone based on the Asterisk IAX protocol allows me to leverage the native transfer capability of Asterisk, providing extremely low-latency point-to-point phone call connections that I wasn’t able to achieve with anything off-the-shelf.

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