An apparatus comprising an encoder circuit and a transcoder circuit. The encoder circuit may be configured to generate a bitstream comprising a series of packets in response to a speech input signal. The transcoder circuit may be configured to generate an intermediate bitstream in response to the bitstream. The transcoder (a) implements (i) a first encoding type comprising a selectable mode voice (SMV) encoding or (ii) a second encoding type comprising an enhanced variable rate (EVR) encoding in response to a type of data in each of the packets of the bitstream and (b) the first or second encoding type is selected on a per packet basis.